For what it’s worth, my second year of PhD was relatively miserable compared to my first and third.
ignore the prestige games, knuckle down and do the best work you can do- it’s more impressive if you succeed at a lower rank institution anyways, imo. And if you want that signalling power you can always plan to go for a postdoc.
Wishing you the best of luck, it can be a lonely path.
The transformer architecture is arguably the most important breakthrough in NLP, and language is the predominant mode of communication between humans, so I fail to see how its "just a load of hype"
I would add that some people working at the Turing institute are also tenured professors, so this is only one of their salaries. Not sure this applies to that exact position, but a person I know is a Turing fellow and professor at a university simultaneously.