Academia can be pretty great if you can live with economic uncertainty, non-unreasonable pay and aren't interested in careerism or that your work has any real impact outside handful of other academics.

There's of course a lot of bullshit, but you can sort of choose the tradeoff between bullshit and career development/stability. If you're OK with a high chance of never getting a permanent job, in many places you can do practically whatever you want.

And if you e.g. know how to code, you can usually go to the industry churn as a backup when your grant streak runs out.

But yes, in the bigger picture, the latter are the sustainable course of action. There's only so many, or rather frew, grants.