There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll start with what made me decide to respond.
I feel the same when I’m in the desert. I feel the same when I’m in the forest. The commonality (for me) has been finding enough mental space to let inspiration hit, which occurs when I’m “in the islands”.
You’re right that doing research outside of academia is hard for lack of access to funds to attend meetings where ideas are talked about, lack of access to papers where ideas are detailed, or lack of access to funds for page charges to publish papers (people always think scientists get paid to publish papers when the opposite is true with page charges totaling $750 or more for a standard-length paper). Heck, there are even subtle hurdles such as that ResearchGate excludes anyone from search results if they don’t have a .edu e-mail address.
You’re also right that what makes it into journals these days is less natural history focused. Fields like “autecology” fell out of favor or got subsumed into “integrative biology”, so it’s hard to know where work like this fits in the modern world.
There’s the iNat answer to your original question (honing species distributions, documenting the timing of biological events, identifying novel species interactions), but that’s kind of what the publication wiki is for. That being said, science moves so fast that there are many questions that never get followed up or researched adequately. Likewise, there are emerging issues that science may not be able to research adequately. So, I think worthwhile science can be done if one is willing to do the hard work to follow up on an idea in the literature, or to do the harder work of moving anecdote to dataset by careful documentation and measurement, or the even harder work still to shepherd those data to publication. It is most definitely harder to do science outside of academia, and certainly limited to a subset of scientific ideas and approaches, but just as certainly not impossible.