Sometimes. I've seen researchers who just churn out useless junk for citation mining and I don't see a lot of overlap between their work and what industry does. That's probably one of the most demoralizing things about academia in my opinion. You sometimes have to be obsequious to people whose goal is just citation farming and whose papers are useless junk filled with buzzwords. I see this a lot in systems and security research. But I also know some researchers who do amazing work and whose research directly gets used in industry.

Yes, I hear you on how academia chases metrics. I would argue this phenomena is not worse than Company Z making a boilerplate AI chat tool that is no more useful than the flagship popular products. I think the fairest comparison is comparing the best researchers in academia/industry. I think they accomplish different things because they have different goals/incentives.