But it is a social aspect. When I started PL research, practitioners scowled upon academia because they considered their legacy issues so much more important than these "Sound typesystems" or even "verification". They basically acted like high schoolers confronted with mathematics: "Yeah, but who needs that stuff? We know how our language parses and we don't care that our compiler is turing-complete as it essentially interprets a half-assed meta language on top, because we cannot see any practical relevance for static analysis besides intellisense. Let us instead discuss this feature here for that special industry use case and how we can abuse some existing keywords to get it implemented."

This attitude has changed drastically nowadays.