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In the USA, patents are explicitly mentioned in the Constitution and the purpose is to incentivize disclosure, not because the founders were worried about industrial espionage. It would have been awfully difficult for hostile powers to remotely hack our R&D facilities in 1789.

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Think again. Hacking is a very old activity; it was not done with computers in 1789, but you can be sure that there was a lot of industrial espionage between Britain and the US at that time.

There is the story of the clove tree, which was monopolized by Dutch East India company, until 1 tree was stolen and seeded elsewhere

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