I've seen some of my smartest friends stagnate to the point of being 9-10th year phds without the ability to navigate the job market. These are people at places like MIT and Caltech.
One of my regrets was turning down an offer at a FAANG to go to grad school in 2014. I finished up in 2020 and couldn't even land an interview despite having a pretty good publication/open-source track record. My advisor was no help on the job market, I felt kicked to the curb.
Took me 1 year to find a job (backend engineer) and I'm still grappling with the fact that I wasted my 20's doing a PhD when I could've at least enjoyed life a little bit more and had a bit of a financial cushion. Honestly, being a swe in industry is a vacation compared to the uncertainty and workload during the phd.
Project ownership was part of the reason I left acadamia.
I conceived, carried out, and kept 2 projects funded over 6 years that ended up in nature and science. I was elated by the pubs. A few months later a colleague I worked with asked me why I wasn't in the patents and I though, what patents? My advisor took out patents on the ideas and cited the papers in the patents without my knowledge. I didn't argue for the sake of leaving with a phd and the probability that those patents would yield financial benefit.
The whole thing left me disillusioned with acadamia...I'm much happier in industry.
it would be fun to add static attractors -ie fruit to see how it biases the trajectories