I agree with you, but the benefits of this kind of research have to be balanced with the harms as well. Rampant consumerism has driven environmental and economic damage, and while it's hard to weigh these kinds of benefits against these kinds of harms, my intuition is that if even a small percentage of the consumerism was caused by this research, the upsides far outweigh the downsides. Of course that's entirely subjective.