You really don't. I've been working with a new author about to publish recently and he's just a regular bloke and his work doesn't seem to hit any of your criteria. Are you sure your impression is grounded in reality?
Maybe I'm missing who is challenging the established narratives and taking the risk as an iconoclast. Who is publishing right now whose ideas are challenging? Taibbi? He still compromises himself for access. Hirsi Ali? She still hedges, even though she's probably got more balls than anyone these days. Houellebecq is only tolerated because he's unthreatening to anyone. The Slate Star Codex guy writes like he still needs brunch invites. Substack is great, but it's not the discourse. The examples I'm thinking of stood on their own so well that they kept their subjects honest. Orwell, Mailer, HST, Mencken, Hitchens, Vidal, Hersh. Writers who traded on integrity to their craft so that their subjects were measured against it. Very best of luck to your writer, I hope you can serve his work honestly.
I think you're possibly moving the goalposts from simply 'publish' to 'be internationally recognised and lauded for major critical thinking'.
The poster responded with plenty of examples which you've dismissed with the unfortunate "goalposts" remark.
Not sure what thread you were reading - the one I responded to said it was impossible in general to get anything new published. You can see hundreds (thousands) of new published works every year. They moved the goalposts by then saying that they only consider publishing to mean critical work.
You’re on a wild roller coaster of opinions there!
How do you get to that point without taking the risk in the first place?
Writers have to start somewhere and they have to publish something in order to have the chance to become recognized.
And even if they fail at that they can still have an impact on someone else’s life in one way or another and to me that’s already valuable enough.
If you want your book to get a decent editor and maybe get a print run in the three or four digits, you don't have to deal with all the faddish bukkake (social media presence, trendy subject matter, performative wokery designed to signal virtue without actually changing anything or challenging capitalism, dodging cancel mobs). You can just write, and you may be able to find an audience organically if you put time and money into it. You probably won't, however, make enough money to write full time.
If your focus is on getting set up to make enough money to write full time, then you do have to worry about all that garbage, because there just aren't many good book deals to go around.
In theory, publishers provide a real service, because self-publishing well is expensive (four, five digits easily). In theory, they should be offering access to people who couldn't afford what it costs to self-publish to the expected standard. In practice? The only people who can get in are people who have the connections and financial resources not to need the help. Whoops.
What we're learning about publishing (which we already knew, those of us who've been studying it) is that no one is good at selling books. Most self-publishers aren't, most traditional publishers aren't, and most PR firms are only good at taking and spending your money. We just don't have a good understanding of why individuals buy books (it changes) and there's a lot of evidence, sadly, that book sales are only loosely correlated to the quality of the writing (in the long term, quality matters more, but a book that dies in the short term won't have a long term).
This is basically correct, although it depends on the definition of "well". You can get a halfway decent cover for $100-$500, and you can get a halfway decent copy editor for about $500-$1000. Tools like Scrivener can handle all the ebook and paper edition formatting for you, with built-in templates, so that's another $100 or so for the tooling, but you can reuse this for future books. Publishing to Amazon and other places (like Smashwords) is free, and this includes print-on-demand paperback copies as well.
What it does take is a lot of time for learning how to use all the tools and to navigate the many options available for covers, editing, etc.
As far as marketing expenses go, there are no good ways to spend money to sell books. I think you're correct that nobody knows how to do it. If you don't win the lottery and get featured on a celebrity's book club, how is anyone supposed to ever know that you even released a book?