Oh come on we owe Fraunhofer at least psychoacoustic compression, the basis of MP3 and most current audio formats. It was also a moonshot project at the time. It's like complaining DARPA lives on the govt handouts: of many things that to it's among the least problematic.
If memory serves me right they had a project to set up digital radio in Africa so low-bandwidth that the spectrum would have room for stations in even the most niche languages. Languages on the edge of extinction, to help those languages survive. No idea if they ever helped a single language, but they sure weren't without impact.
(I suppose the project was one of many related to audio compression, but it was the one I heard a presentation of, to highschool-age youth in the style of "this is what a career in science might look like")
There is an alternative argument that government should be treated like any other financing partner and recieve a share of ownership in such patents with the revenues used to fund further works, thereby driving the majority of funding to things which have the greatest consumer benefits (proven through the value of patents).
There's ways that leaves us with some innovations left by the wayside though, so a mixed system would likely be best to ensure the best net outcomes
