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In all seriousness, I think you're lucky then.

(I can only speak for my experience and those of my peers in my field, at the end of the day)

I agree, but my estimate 90% of my peers' PhDs (including mine) were essentially 3 years of work on an idea that did not work, or trying and failing to find an idea that did work. Then writing up your work as if it was great. The 10% of "successful" PhDs were on ideas that were almost guaranteed to work - more development than research.

This was in a proper hard engineering field though. I think in other fields can be much more likely to be things that can't really fail. For example in computer science, a lot of PhDs are just like "I implemented this thing" where there's very little risk of it simply not working.

An exception in computing is AI research where it is very much like the "try some stuff; it didn't work" experience of engineering and science research. I imagine a PhD in AI is not a fun experience...

In hindsight it should've been a huge red flag to me when the only "what's it like to do a Ph. D" students at the induction were comp. sci.

My advice to most people would just be "don't". My second run of advice would be "find the most boring project imaginable" since it's likely to succeed on the basis of "do a bunch of fairly predictable experiments and publish them".

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