"Plus, academia tends to lag behind industries and are notorious for teaching dated technologies." and then preaches about alternative degrees, language choice, ...
I fail to see the point, the Data Science degree programs I know about are mostly about teaching fundamentals, with technology and courses on state-of-the-art stuff in whatever subfield might interest you potentially. You have better or worse degree programs in every field. Academia might lag behind the industry in terms of technology stacks but certainly not when it comes to techniques. Apart from the few top players hardly any foundational research comes out of the industry these days.