I believe this is viewed as a feature, and not a bug. For the most part, academia serves as one of the few reliable ways to emigrate to the U.S., and exploits that fact to generate a large pool of inexpensive labor. In exchange, these students are rewarded with a US visa and a comparatively well-paying job.
Neither party expects these graduates to stay in academia, so the ability to follow orders, work to a deadline, and solve highly-abstract problems provide a much more tangible benefit than inculcating the creativity, communication skills, and bureaucratic know-how that differentiates successful professors.
In many ways, including these reasons, I think the PhD is starting to be viewed by some as a "super-Masters degree" that simply requires more work or takes longer, rather than as requiring a distinct, different skillset.
Note that this is based only on my observations of a top-50 US graduate program; this might be totally different in a top-4 program, for example. However, one data point I found particularly persuasive is that in our program with ~300 PhD students, we have fewer than 30 (and probably fewer than 10) students with US citizenship or green cards.