No one’s denigrating those who choose to do a PhD, most of them I am sure are bright, ambitious and thoughtful individuals. Unfortunately the Academic Meat grinder system, successfully grinds them into working 80hr weeks on meaningless projects, meaningless papers that just serve to create jobs for other academics. They could be doing so much more with the faculty they possess, alas they would be more useful as a barista. (I am not picking on humanities PhD system, which is a bigger cesspool than normal, all my criticism is aimed at STEM PhD system. My actual advice would be do a PhD if you judge the lab you are joining as doing great work, lab is everything, don’t join a PhD if it’s not a lab that you’ve vetted or if you didn’t get into that lab.)