I’ve had some experience with the NIH process, and grant writing is actually 100% the same thing as resume padding. You’ll have random people on the review boards complain that your grant doesn’t touch on their favorite hobby horse.

In the grand scheme of things if this looks like all this is is swapping out terms, it’s literally always been this way. It just wasn’t made into official documents.

Sure this is idiotic, but this has been going on just unofficially for arbitrary things for years based on independent reviewers.