Of course everything you say about the software industry is true, right down to the "libertarianism and Austrian economics" (I take it you prefer critical race theory and postcolonial studies). Otherwise, your critics would have said something rather than just downvoting you.

Your problem seems to be that you haven't considered the possibility that academia is even worse. Academia is even worse. (I dropped out of the Berkeley PhD program in 1992 - specialty, OS and languages. From what I can tell, academia has only gotten worse since then.)

I could produce a parallel list of bullet points, but I'll just say three things. The only reason to go to grad school is because you want to be a professor. The only reason to be a professor is because you want to be a bureaucrat. Do you want to be a bureaucrat?

Even if you want to be a bureaucrat, there's no guarantee that you'll be good at it. Good bureaucrats don't write posts like the one you just wrote. They don't antagonize anyone, ever, in any way. They would rather lie - and they do. Are you good at that?

One of the things you'll discover in academia, for instance, is that the most appalling faux pas you can commit is to say anything bad about your colleagues' research. "Colleagues" meaning, of course, only whatever little log-rolling grant mafia you've wound up joining. You're perfectly free to criticize its enemies - though not the endeavor as a whole. Oh, you didn't want to join a mafia? You think someone is going to fund you just because you're smart and have cool ideas? Strange ideas you have there, kid.

I understand what you want CS research to be. CS research isn't what you want it to be. CS research is a gigantic government bureaucracy. Nor is it unique. Science itself is a gigantic government bureaucracy. Do you think it's not deceptive? Systematic deception is its very lifeblood.

Can science of the sort you're looking for exist? Of course it can exist. You can find it very easily. All you need is a time machine. Set the controls for at least 40 years ago.

Otherwise, the simplest way to do the kind of research you want to do is to decide quite consciously to give yourself over to the salt-mining industry in the most mercenary possible way, spend a decade making as much money as you possibly can (and spending as little as you can), and (if you succeed) found your own little university of one. It's not Victorian science, either, but I'll tell you it's a lot closer than Berkeley.