For people who spent about the same amount of time in academia, we had very different experiences.

I don’t think you’ve spent much time in academia. It’s not an all-you-can-eat buffet, it’s a trek through the desert where every drop of water counts. One of the big reasons why the whole thing is falling apart is that postdocs and undergrad researchers, who do all the actual work, have been tragically underpaid for years. Add in a tiny chance to be arrested and deported on top of that and it’s instantly not worth it to tons of foreign students who were thinking of going to college in America.

“… money / labor spigot so many research programs were overly-reliant on.”

I don’t see how research or more generally anything at all could get done without money or labor.