> Do you think more than half of all STEM graduate students had a similar experience as she did? Do you have actual data to support this?

Yes, her entire description about her experience (safe for that weirdness with the textbook sweatshop) is relatable. I am not sure what you are looking for but STEM PhD attrition rates speak for themselves. Those do not include PhDs that decide to leave academia after retrieving their PhD. Not to mention the frequently discussed mental health crisis that consistently gets Nature articles.

HN's negativity is comparable to the negativity I have seen with CS, Maths, and Physics PhDs and PostDocs in personal discussions. See also PhD comics: https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive/phd072011s.gif

If you are an idealist you will of course be worn down by the way many academic institutions are set up. There is a ton of writing on this, e.g., https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/decline.txt

I did a PhD in CS. There were certainly some students who had a bad experience, but I don't think it was the majority or even near the majority. I think 1 in 5 is a reasonable guess. The ones who did do tend to be more vocal about it, which is natural.

Computer science is much, much more marketable than typical PhDs.

Let me add another point of anectdata. I did my CS PhD with a full scholarship in the UK. Then a 3.5 year postdoc in a great Leinbiz institute in Germany. Part of a huge EU project (in Framework Programne 7)

By all measures, I was "living the life" in academia. with both my parents being academics (both researchers and pretty published in their fields)

Yet, I left it after the project finished. The prospect of having to write papers just because. The amount of trash papers I had to review for free but then looking at the cost of proceeding books (I got them for free through my institution... but what a racket it is!!)

The prospect of the "academic path" ((abitur, lecturer, associate prof and then prof) praying the stupid game..

I left it all and turned to the startup world . Maybe it was my engineer mind, but I feel way more fulfilled after 12 years in industry.

I was a biological anthropology postdoc for a year or so. My office mate used to refer to the process of turning one decent idea into as many papers as possible as producing LPUs ("Least Publishable Units"). He was joking, but it wasn't a joke.

It was depressing. I dropped out. I have love for academia, but there is a pretty overwhelming amount of gamesmanship in surviving that system. I found becoming a developer a much easier career to navigate.