Have you ever seen the history of science? Left is absolutely not true to the point that we’ve had to wait for powerful scientists to die to get the progress they’ve held back entered to record.

This doesn’t disprove their meme. What it is saying is still true. Those scientist you mention held back progress and couldn’t be “real scientists”

Could it be the phenomenon we also see in areas such as Engineering were as people get more senior most transit into more managerial positions, where the mindset is a lot more about managing appearances and stakeholders, and saying the right things at the right time to the right people rather than the far more “it is as it is” mindset of those on the technical side?

I actually started by going into Science at Uni but ended up switching to Engineering (not many jobs for Experimentalist Physicists in my homeland) so never actually saw the actual Science career track from the inside through the eyes of somebody with enough professional experience to see the more subtle things about it, so I am genuinely curious if the Science career too has the phenomenon in Engineering of Senior people tending to be more Administrator/Manager and less Technical hence with more tendency to manage the subjective perception of reality of others to achieve personal and career goals and less of a desire for things to be as clear and as objective as possible.