> I've always thought that new PhDs

A well written PhD or MSc thesis is often the best way into a new field, ime. If the committee is good on this aspect they'll insist you've put enough detail in for someone to follow along mostly self contained.

Also, I believe there is a hierarchy that goes something like: academic papers -> review articles -> specialized books -> text books.

The text changes to fit the audience, and the knowledge becomes more accepted (and or fundamental) further down the line.

There's very little academic kudos survey articles or other educational articles (as another commentator mentioned, PhD theses are often the best place to go for those types of summary). I'm not sure how one changes that. I remember thinking during my PhD how helpful it would be to have more survey type articles - especially for the subfields adjacent to one's own - you want to know if there are useful connections to your work but you don't want to delve through dozens of extremely dense papers.

> Review articles, sometimes called surveys.

Is this field specific? I have read survey articles in math and biology, and was told by some of my profs that they use these articles as an introduction to a new field.

A quick Google search seems to show these exist in CS (along with tutorial papers), physics, and chemistry but I'm having a little difficulty finding statistics survey papers (survey methods come up instead).

Is the problem that there aren't enough of them or they are behind paywalls?

For Stats, check out https://www.annualreviews.org/journal/statistics

Please suggest others if you find them.

Annual Reviews has a bunch of journals for surveys of various fields. Most of them are paywalled, but there's ways around that.