Part of the cleverness of GANs was to have found a way to train a neural network that generates data without explicitly modeling the probability density.
In a stats textbook, when you know that your training data comes from a normal distribution, you can maximize the MLE wrt the parameters, and then use that for sampling. That's basic theory.
In practice, it was very hard to learn a good pdf for experimental data when you had a training set of images. GANs provided a way to bypass this.
Of course, people could have said "hey let's generate samples without maximizing a loglikelihood first", but they didn't know how to do it properly, how to train the network in any other way besides minimizing cross-entropy (which is equivalent to maximizing loglikelihood).
Then GANs actually provided a new loss function that could be trained. Total paradigm shift!
I also found that the best system is having the first layer of folder organization be "which period of my time is this from?".
Conceptually, it's easier to think of "music from high school" than about the specific mix of subgenres from my playlist back then. Same for documents that I saved. Those ICQ logs from high school are there. They don't belong in the same folder as the stuff I wrote yesterday, even though they could be of a similar nature.
You're setting a very high bar there, and then claiming that losing access to your gmail account isn't worse than that therefore it's not life changing.
Email ends up being the form of online identity for a lot of people, myself included, so that almost every service that I sign for has my email address as ID. If that email address isn't the ID, it's the preferred way of resetting passwords. I wouldn't be super happy about Facebook being my online ID, nor my cell phone number (see SIM swapping problems).
It's life changing in the same way that losing all your personal documents in a fire sets you up accounting nightmares. Moreover, you're making very light a situation about losing all your pictures. I'm not talking about food pictures, but there's plenty of "me" that's contained in being able to look at pictures of important events of my life (which is why I don't rely only on cloud backups for that).
I'm sorry that that was your PhD experience. It's a pity that enthusiastic students end up there, often because they're not given the right environment to thrive (e.g. a good lab and a supervisor that cares).
There isn't much to say to respond to that, apart that it seems to me that, in a parallel universe, you might have had a more fulfilling experience, or you might have cut your losses and walked away sooner.
That's the cruel aspect of the PhD. It really seems like a lot of important things are outside of one's control, especially when it comes to important factors in mental health. Nobody's starting a PhD with the goal of sinking hours into Reddit and Buffy because they feel awful about their PhD experience.
You could even write an article asking why that original article was even written, and it might make for more interesting content.