v.s. politicking forever, enslaving grad students and making only a passable salary? Not to mention being incentivized to lie, cheat and steal when publishing in order to maintain your position?

Academia as we know it has been dead for a while, and AI is the final harbinger. The reproducibility crisis got that much worse now that the papers that nobody ever bothered to reproduce have grown 10x in number with the press of a button.

At least the industry research jobs pay well, even if they suffer many of the same issues.