I probably didn't miss a red sox game on my transistor radio. The point is there were plenty of companies to commercialize the transistor. But nobody but government, academia and large monopoly-driven labs would do the basic research and innovation to come up with the transistor. Government funding is a bigger component nowadays and back then they were not. We have seen some pretty neat things from microsoft research like Google maps (way before Google). Facebook sponsors data science research including with the researcher who stole the data. There's no question there's more good than harm in that kind of research, and some percentage of it does not add to those companies' bottom lines. The researchers are proposing new ideas, many of which will not pan out.
You can't simply brush this all aside and say it was inevitable. Someone has to have lots of extra dollars to spend on this research. Increasingly that will be the Chinese but much of that research will be shared with the rest of the world.
“You can’t simply brush this all aside and say it was inevitable.”
I don’t.
As you said, it still goes on today. The private engine of innovation is still running hot.
But there are companies that are not close to monopoly who are doing pure research. IBM. GE. Lockheed. Cisco. And many more.