> the life of an academic is dominated by competition for grant funding
This depends heavily on where you are. I personally don't spend an onerous amount of time applying for grants. If you're at what are called "R1" universities in the US (places like MIT, Stanford, UT-Austin, etc.), then yes, your job as professor (at least in STEM) is basically to run a research lab of maybe 4-10 people, which means a lot of personnel management, finding funding to pay them, and PR (although there is some research, mentorship, etc too).
At smaller places with either a teaching orientation or more of a mixed research/teaching orientation, things work a lot differently. I personally feel quite free in my choice of research problems and how I spend my time outside of teaching. We don't have a PhD program and I don't run a "lab", just do my own research, sometimes with BS/MS students and sometimes with colleagues at other universities, so I don't have a lot of funding needs. The university does appreciate if I apply for grants now and then, but maybe 0.5-1 applications a year (I got one small NSF one, which they were super happy about). I do teach more classes than at an R1: a prof there would typically teach one a semester, while I teach two. Overall I'd estimate I spend about 15-20 hours/wk on teaching my two classes (including prep, grading, etc.), 5-10 on administration/service, and thus have about 10-20 working hours left to do whatever kind of research I'd like to do. In the summer of course the research time goes up as I don't teach.
At the moment, partly due to industry hiring away so many CS academics, I believe it's actually a quite good job to be a CS academic at a non-R1 place if you like the teaching part and the salary is sufficient for your needs/preferences. The university knows that you can leave and hiring people in this area is difficult, so if you teach reasonably well, publish anything at all, and apply for a grant now and then, they're basically just happy you're staying. This is CS-specific though; academic jobs are much more scarce in other fields, so it's less of an "employee's market" there.
This depends heavily on where you are. I personally don't spend an onerous amount of time applying for grants. If you're at what are called "R1" universities in the US (places like MIT, Stanford, UT-Austin, etc.), then yes, your job as professor (at least in STEM) is basically to run a research lab of maybe 4-10 people, which means a lot of personnel management, finding funding to pay them, and PR (although there is some research, mentorship, etc too).
At smaller places with either a teaching orientation or more of a mixed research/teaching orientation, things work a lot differently. I personally feel quite free in my choice of research problems and how I spend my time outside of teaching. We don't have a PhD program and I don't run a "lab", just do my own research, sometimes with BS/MS students and sometimes with colleagues at other universities, so I don't have a lot of funding needs. The university does appreciate if I apply for grants now and then, but maybe 0.5-1 applications a year (I got one small NSF one, which they were super happy about). I do teach more classes than at an R1: a prof there would typically teach one a semester, while I teach two. Overall I'd estimate I spend about 15-20 hours/wk on teaching my two classes (including prep, grading, etc.), 5-10 on administration/service, and thus have about 10-20 working hours left to do whatever kind of research I'd like to do. In the summer of course the research time goes up as I don't teach.
At the moment, partly due to industry hiring away so many CS academics, I believe it's actually a quite good job to be a CS academic at a non-R1 place if you like the teaching part and the salary is sufficient for your needs/preferences. The university knows that you can leave and hiring people in this area is difficult, so if you teach reasonably well, publish anything at all, and apply for a grant now and then, they're basically just happy you're staying. This is CS-specific though; academic jobs are much more scarce in other fields, so it's less of an "employee's market" there.