The post made some points and you’ve said it was wrong to make them. Who am I supposed to believe? I would like to understand more about your position, but you’ve chosen not to actually address any of their points.
Sorry, don’t mistake my tone for condescension. I just wanted to explain how this looks to an outside observer.
The post is telling young researchers to ignore the main reason they went into research - scientific discovery (what the author calls "Science 1") - and focus on playing the academia prestige pissing contest game ("Science 2") in a cynical career optimization move.
Academic politics always existed of course. We should not be under any illusions that the greats of the past just wrote their manuscripts in isolation. However it was not an industrialized machine like it is now, and incentives are misaligned in academia to such a degree that the machination of academic politics killed the reason why academia exists in the first place (scientific discovery).
To advance in the academic cursus honorum, one goes to a presitgious undergrad to go to a prestigious grad school, so you can get a prestigious postdoc grant, so you can get a tenured position at a prestigious institution, so you can get a fat and prestigious government grant, which you use to hire bright young students who want to do the same. Note that scientific advancement does not play a role in this cycle, it's actually safer to pursue incremental and irrelevant improvements which you get published through thanks to the connections you made throughout your prestige optimization career.
As a result, academia has produced no notable scientific advances in a long time. It has instead evolved into an organism which selects individuals that excel at funneling money into itself under the guise of doing science while not necessarily doing science (though it incidentally occasionally may).
The kind of behaviour the author is promoting is telling individual prospective grad students you're small, the academic politics machine is so big, yes we all know it's a farce but you just need to suck it up and play the game. In doing so, the prospective grad students will strengthen the machine that is actually killing the very thing they want to cherish and promote, in the hope that they receive a few scraps in return.
(Writing all this as a PhD and former journal reviewer)
Hot take, the elephant in the room is that the firehose of easy discoveries has run dry in most physical sciences. Accordingly, the academic community is probably an order of magnitude oversized, but there will be little incentive to scale itself down. As a result you see an academic machine idling.
Invention is a slow process filled with periods where progress feels like it has stalled. Then, we have a breakthrough, sometimes major, other times incremental. Seeing it in hindsight is easy, living through it is hard as we measure our experiences in seconds.
Sorry, don’t mistake my tone for condescension. I just wanted to explain how this looks to an outside observer.