Out of my many friends who have gone into academia, the most successful one works the least by far: maybe 1-2 hours per day on average. He publishes more papers than the rest of his department put together. At 35 he had more citations than 90% of PhDs at the end of their career.

This individual chose his field of study, university, department, collaborators etc etc based on time leverage. Everything is done remotely and there are practically no meetings. Every paper written produces material for another three. Every sentence is recycled from publication to publication if possible. Automation (python scripts) performs most of the analytical work. Conferences are attended exclusively to find more collaborators to feed into the system. Tier 1 journals are pursued relentlessly. Extra-research commitments are brutally minimised. Most importantly his data collection methodologies are hundreds of times more time-effective than his peers. We're at the beach together most summer afternoons. Having read some of his work, it's much better science than most as well.

The fact is most people aren't tactical about their careers. They don't want to hear what it takes to be successful in the system and would rather treat their PhD as a hoity-toity vocation than admit they have more in common with a blue-collar miner than with Kant or Mendel. If you want to cosplay as Darwin then you need to get on a boat for 5 years on your father's money and cross your fingers you have a brilliant revelation. But if you see your education as a job and apply a hacker mentality academia is easy ground to till.