> Any PhD worth their salt would know that a much more likely reason why their hard skills were valuable had nothing to do with PhDs and everything to do with them as a person being able to complete a PhD.

I often equate my Ph.D. with the ability to teach myself how to do things. Ex. going from a wet/dry lab biologist with zero experience in C-style languages, to learning Arduino's flavor of Cpp and the PID control library to run process controls for your wet lab biology experiment.