In the past people who did science could do so with less personally on the line. In the early days you had men of letters like Cavendish who didn't really need to care if you liked what he wrote, he'd be fine without any grants. That obviously doesn't work for everyone, but then the tenure system developed for a similar reason: you have to be able to follow an unproductive path sometimes without starving. And that can mean unproductive in that you don't find anything or in that your peers don't rate your work. There'd be a gap between being a young researcher and tenured, sure.
Nowadays there's an army of precariously employed phds and postdocs. Publish or perish is a trope. People get really quite old while still being juniors in some sense, and during that time everyone is thinking "I have to not jeopardise my career".
When you have a system where all the agents are under huge pressure, they adapt in certain ways: take safer bets, write more papers from each experiment, cooperate with others for mutual gain, congregate around previous winners, generally more risk reducing behaviour.
Perhaps the thing to do is make a hard barrier: everyone who wants to be a researcher needs to get tenure after undergrad, or not at all. (Or after masters or whatever, I wouldn't know.) Those people then get a grant for life. It will be hard to get one of these, but it will be clear if you have to give up. Lab assistants and other untenured staff know what they are negotiating for. Tenured young people can start a family and not have the rug pulled out when they write something interesting.