I'm very sure of what the benefits are. Both directly (not necessarily a lot, apart from knowledge, which is worth it in itself) and indirectly (a huge amount)
As to all that "seems to have been invented by one person" stuff... hmm... I think you are understating the amount of collaborative work that went into these things since. The TV may have been invented by one person but no-one uses his original model any more as it is, by today's standards, utterly crap. Hundreds of people have worked to make it much better. Ditto mobile phones, radios, microwaves, etc etc etc. Technology moves much faster when many people work on it. Even the world wide web was hardly finished when Tim Berners-Lee had done his stuff, and since then it has been changed, improved, adapted, and used by many thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people.
Individual contributions can make a huge difference. Individuals working together make an even bigger one. Don't underestimate the advantage of a collaborative effort. And, for that matter, don't underestimate the benefits that may yet surprise us when they come out of CERN, and other physics experiments.
I think it was GH Hardy who said something along the lines of how little actual use any of his work in pure mathematics actually was. A few years later, it and related work in number theory was used to crack the Enigma code. Since then, some of his work is also behind secure credit-card transactions. Even the apparently useless work at the time can have hidden benefits. Sometimes it will not. But you never know until you find out. Let us hope that scientists continue to waste taxpayers' money for many years to come, then: it will be returned with plenty of interest later down the line.