100%. You can both commercialize transformers while still exploring new paths. Having one of the world's top researchers doing productization work is a huge waste of their time.

You also see this whenever news about novel but small models comes out. People are instantly dismissive. "Oh it's small, who cares?" Of course it's small, why waste resources testing it on a larger scale before making sure it works well on a small scale? Would people rather news not come out until it's SOTA model?