The ultimate extreme of this is Aristotle, who got philosophy off to an unfortunate beginning by starting his Metaphysics with the assumption that the most noble knowledge would be the most useless.

You really are not giving Aristotle enough credit here. While he followed Plato in regarding the most abstract knowledge as the most noble, he was deliberately bringing in the notion that it was also useless.

Notably, he wrote Metaphysics after Physics (thus the name), and most of his time was spent on his more empirical works.

ETA: To be a little more informative, here's a quick gloss of the relevant distinction at the time:

Plato thought that 'forms' (abstract ideas, akin to an OOP 'class') were the 'most real' (unpack that at your peril) and specific objects were merely imperfect, largely irrelevant copies of those. Aristotle thought that no, physical things are the most real, and 'forms' only exist if they are instantiated in an object.

Thus, Plato did a lot of speculation about metaphysics, while Aristotle spent most of his time counting the number of doodads on various plants and animals and figuring out how things work.