I'm sure you are a Scientist. I worked as a Scientist (not a data scientist etc), worked on pure science projects that ran under grants from government, spoke at international conferences presenting the findings etc. Believe me. Every single move in this "science" work was guided by funding. Not just my projects, but all of them.
So nobody in your department ever ran out of stipend or research funding?
Nope. The grants were always sort of 5-year projects. They just keep on going. We were employees, doing the work we were asked to do, not doing something we were curious about. For example, do this experiment, get field measurements, correlate them to some factors and publish a report. Ensure it takes 5 years and nothing less.
All I have to say is that it was not uncommon for people to run out of funding at my research university, nor others I was at.
Yes, I agree there is a funding requirement for academic science. Hell, even attending a conference you've been accepted to is prohibitively expensive if out of your own pocket.
But your original statement was far too broad:
> there is not a scientist, artist, researcher or writer who is not driven by funding.
There are absolutely members from every one of those subsets driven by curiousity.
(In my own life, I have reached out to labs in completely different fields than my own to help publish out of nothing more than pure curiosity.)