v.s. politicking forever, enslaving grad students and making only a passable salary? Not to mention being incentivized to lie, cheat and steal when publishing in order to maintain your position?

Academia as we know it has been dead for a while, and AI is the final harbinger. The reproducibility crisis got that much worse now that the papers that nobody ever bothered to reproduce have grown 10x in number with the press of a button.

At least the industry research jobs pay well, even if they suffer many of the same issues.

Additionally, as a former industry researcher myself who now teaches at a community college, there is less research freedom in industry, especially with very free places like 1970-era Bell Labs and Xerox PARC half a century in the rear view mirror. Focused industry research is definitely valuable, but there seems to be fewer places in modern society that allow a researcher to be driven primarily by curiosity.

well, you're allowed to patent and have proprietary rights to the contents of your graduate school research if they meet the criteria lol, in fact, that is a good idea for a student working on a novel technology.

If you work for a private firm, then they presumably own the rights to patents you develop while under their employment, depending on your contract. But also, you have access to patents and technologies through the corporate patent sharing agreements and licenses that you'd never have access to in the university system, so it can work both ways, where you may be able to develop things not possible in traditional academia, but whether you actually retain those rights is not as clear as in academia.

How do you feel about internships?