What's worse is that in most of these fields, you don't really even start working until after your PhD.
4 years is going to be a long time to underfund what's basically 4 entire classes of researchers coming out of Doctorate programs. It might take decades to recover our research programs.
Specifics of the current environment aside, welcome to academic life. Unless you are one of the exceptionally fortunate few to have a permanent fellowship of some sort (e.g. Howard Hughes), your primary job as a research professor is to raise funding.
During the doubling of the NIH budget under Clinton and Bush the younger times were great. After, budgets stagnated and things were harder but there was still funding out there. The disruption we're seeing now is a completely different animal: program officers are gone, fewer and less detailed summary statements go out, some programs are on hiatus (SBIR/STTR) and if you have something in the till it was wasted time, &c. NSF is a complete train wreck.
My startup had an STTR in for the last cycle and we can't talk to the program officer about our summary statement, nor can we resubmit, nor are we likely to be funded. That's a lot of lost time and money for a startup that, since we're atoms and not bits, is funded on a shoestring budget. The only time something like this happened in my memory was the shutdown in 2013 and that wasn't even close to the disruption we're seeing now.
But again, I explicitly said that my point was independent of recent changes in funding. I am no longer in science, but it seems to be true that funding has declined. That doesn’t mean that chasing grants is something unprecedented for scientists to be doing.
One last time: OP was complaining that the group has to spend all of it's time raising funding, but that's always been true in my lifetime. There's never been a magical age where being a PI (or even a senior lab member) wasn't a perpetual process of raising funds, and anyone going into science should know this. Hence my comment: welcome to academia.
For whatever it's worth, this is basically reason #1 that most PhD grads I know voluntarily jumped off the hamster wheel. Anyone who gets a PhD and expects to be doing labwork as a PI is deeply deluded, and it needs to be shouted for the folks in the back: you are signing up for a lifetime of writing grants, teaching classes, and otherwise doing bureaucratic schleps. The current administration did not suddenly make this true.
You're saying that a group having to spend all of its time fundraising has always been true in your lifetime and you link it to your time as a grad student decades ago and earlier when you were an undergrad. Do I have that right? The dominance of fundraising might have been true for your specific experience and viewpoint, but I don't understand your basis for claiming it was universal: it certainly wasn't my experience (R1 engineering, not software) nor my colleagues around that time.
Complaints about fundraising and administrivia have always been plentiful but actual time spent on teaching and service and research were dominant, with the expected proportions of the three legged stool varying based on role and institution. What SubiculumCode and bane and myself are reacting to now is the dramatic shift in how dominant (because funding has been pulled, funding allocation methods have suddenly shifted) and unproductive (fewer summary statements, less or no feedback from SROs and POs, eliminated opportunities for resubmissions) that work has become. The closest I can remember to the current was around the aftermath of the 2008 recession and 2013 government shutdown and that pales in comparison to the disruption of now.
edit: best study I could casually find is Anderson and Slade (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11162-015-9376-9) from 2016 that estimates grant writing at about 10% effort.