I feel like if you're technically savvy enough to have a good reason to be anonymous on the internet, you're hopefully technically savvy enough to not use incognito mode to do so.
You should really look Matt Might up. He was an entrepreneur while working on his PhD. While he was a CS professor he had a child who had an extremely rare genetic disorder. He pivoted his entire life and focused all of his energy on learning about his son's condition. Since then he has become the Director of the Hugh Kaul Precision Medicine Institute at the University of Alabama. Hardly a career of "wasted years" of an "entire life in academia".