What is that strawman exactly? You are saying that anyone can do PhD level research with just a laptop and the internet. I am saying that that is extremely difficult and impossible for the vast majority of people.

Maybe I’m misreading, but the strawman seems to be that research can be done in a vacuum without collaborating.

The parent commenter seems to be suggesting that a PhD isn’t a requirement to work successfully on interesting research problems. It’s possible to go online and read the same papers everyone’s reading. You can still talk to people to get guidance and find out known things that are not published.

Ya I guess it was something of a strawman. But it's pretty close to the truth since it's very hard to get good guidance outside academia or places like google with lots of phds around.