The title is ambiguous and evokes Fisher, so I apologize.
Attempt for a better title: "Why was it non-philosophers who first noticed that randomization could be used to investigate the usefulness of the methods of who gets science funding and how?"
It seems like a failure, at least to meet philosophy of science's self-conception.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0039368118300190 (2019)
"Gillies (2014) is the first published paper by a philosopher of science to call for random allocation of research funds."
"Greenberg (1998) presented the first argument in an academic journal (to my knowledge) for funding science by lottery."
"Nearly a decade later, Brezis (2007) presented an economic model based proposal for introducing a random element into R&D project selection"
"Graves et al. (2011) presents the most thorough measurement pub lished to date of the variability of grant peer review scores.8 The authors used the raw peer review scores assigned by individual panel members to 2705 grant proposals. All proposals were submitted to the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia (NHMRC) in 2009. The scores were given by reviewers sitting on panels of seven, nine, or eleven members, and the average score of the panel was used to decide whether a project was funded or not, based on its rank relative to other proposals."
"it seems that philosophy of science could be doing better in engaging the audiences that are relevant for increasing the allocation of resources to help promote scientific novelty"
Personal opinion: People typically refer to "meta-science" not "philosophy of science", when they raise these kinds of proposals, and it raises the question of why "philosophy of science" doesn't/didn't encompass this