Livre d'Or

I don't think of myself as a strong person, fwiw. And the majority of the things that made the latter part of my PhD miserable were extraneous to my being on a PhD course and seem unlikely to be issues for anyone else; I don't know that that many people's supervisors are likely to move mid-PhD to a place the particular student will hate with quite such a passion as I did nor prompt quite that shape of familial making-things-worse.

"kind of job I wanted" and "passionate about their subjects" is exactly the direction I am kind of handwaving at in mildly confused disagreement, because, while I am seeing that caring passionately about what one does for a living, both during the PhD and longer-term, can be a major factor in choosing to do one and finding it worth doing, bumbling into one by default has led me to fifteen years that have been mostly satisfying in the ways I personally want from my job. (Which basically boils down to "net-positive impact on the world", "I am capable of doing it well enough to justify being paid", "pays me enough to live reasonably comfortably", "enough free time to do the things I actually care about", and "indoor work with permanent internet connection and hardly any heavy lifting".) In other words, if what the brilliant student in question actually wants long-term is to have a job supporting the life they want rather than a life supporting the job they want, a PhD can be a worthwhile route to that end even if it is not like that for the time spent actually doing it.