Of course, it depends entirely on your cohort/field. My point was that it's extremely common for PhD students to just go through the motions and pretend to be doing impactful work.

There is at best a tacit approval of treating your studies as "pretend research". At worst, depending on how the grants/scholarships are doled out and the personality of the supervisor, there is active pressure to go down a certain path that both you and your supervisor know will not produce impactful research but instead maximise your probability of publishing a "passable" thesis.

This is not in Lesbian Dance Theory, this is in the Faculty of Engineering at a top-ranked university in Australia.