We didn't get any papers out during my actual time there, I wrote up a bunch of my results after i'd finished my viva and that got published in 2022 after I'd switched career tragecteries from science to software.
I'm incredibly lucky that my partner had a job that could make ends meet while writing up, and to find a company willing to take on a Chemistry PhD as a data engineer with no proven commercial experience.
My experience was a wild ride of high highs and crushing lows, I can't imagine doing that for over 7 years.
Though I was pretty much hired on the basis that I would have a PhD and the hirer (who had a PhD) took great pleasure in filling the company full of PhDs purely to annoy the CEO who had dropped out of his PhD...
17 years. Top that if you can.
Yes, I survived. Shook off all the daggers in my back, like a dog under a garden hose, and keep walking my own path, as usually.
And not, sometimes the problem is not the student.
I think the real problems here are:
1. PhD admissions has gotten increasingly competitive, so now a lot of people need to take shitty predoctoral RA positions for 2 years before they even get to start the PhD. Though this means they should be quicker to be able to start a project once they're in, many programs are inflexible with the expected Y1/Y2 timeline.
2. Some advisors are real assholes and will purposefully hold back students because a 6th+ year PhD student gives very good value per dollar. This is something programs really need to do a better job of protecting against. There's also just advisors that are bad at mentoring/project management (it's not like it is part of their training really), and while a strict cap on the duration of the degree might nominally address this, it's not a good solution for the long term health of the system.
3. To get a tenured professorship is increasingly competitive, and already exceedingly so. Once you start a postdoc you are more "on the clock" in some ways, and where you do your postdoc(s) can be hugely important to if you will get a tenure track offer. So there are also many students that purposely keep PhD status for an extra year just to give themselves more time to find a postdoc they want and make sure they've wrapped up their PhD papers before starting.
My impression is that a lot of similar issues exist with academia in the EU, they're just not as baked directly into the PhD experience. Which makes the PhD there much more suitable for someone planning an industry exit all along. Kind of ironic given the US love of industry more generally.
Granted, I mostly meet international researchers who chose to exit to the US for one reason or another at some stage of their career, which is a biased sample. But there have been a lot of recent articles about postdoc protests in some European countries as well. The dragging on of career "training" in a ridiculously competitive job market, where the trainees are the primary labor source, is still a problem for academia regardless of when the terminal degree is conferred.
During my undergraduate they had just introduced student loans, but there were no university fees and most people got some kind means tested grants for living costs. The student loans were intended to top up these grants.
I went straight from undergrad to PhD - the University had funding from SERC (or maybe it was the successor to this EPSRC) for a number of PhD places and they offered one to me.
From what I remember it was quite usual to go straight from undergrad to a PhD - at least the majority of PhD students I was around were straight from undergrad.
A few of my friends did masters - again the fees were paid (I think some of them got grants as well).