Unfortunately true for most scientific communities and the reason why the current academic system is badly broken and talented young minds decide to quit academia before even submitting a dissertation.
Talented young minds are mostly quitting because of terrible pay, inexperienced/cruel supervisors, long hours, gambling on tenure, and opportunities in private industry.
The groupthink and publishing pressure are also problems, but they're very secondary to hellish career conditions.
The reasons you raise are very true (I have been there), but most of them are mere symptoms of something deeper. I believe the root causes are exactly the kind of social dynamics discussed in the article.
Terrible pay / other opportunities:
Even at Ass. Prof. level pay is not so terrible. Sure, you won't get rich, but for most in academia that never has been a goal and would not matter.
Long Hours:
That also mostly would not be a problem, as long as you would be able to do what you truly like.
Cruel supervisors:
Here it's getting interesting. Why do you think that is? My hypothesis is that people become cruel if they don't like what they do. They basically become grumpy old men at the age of 40, because they always have to fight. Fight for money, fight against reviewers, fight internal department politics. Supervisors become cruel because they secretly hate their jobs, or better: the jobs the system makes them do.
Gambling on Tenure:
If you have the "right" supervisor in the "right" field (read: a good networker in the current hype topic) your chances are actually not that bad. But as soon as you do something that is either currently not on the radar of the community, or you do something that is even controversial, you get yourself into a fight - which as a young researcher you will lose. In academia you can only make it, if you are well connected and the community carries you there. Group think again. After years in the system I believe it all boils down to that: social dynamics and group think.
Academia was always broken. Despite the current undeserved reputation as academia being open to debate and new ideas, the opposite has always been true. Academia has its sordid history of dogmaticism and hero-worshipping. And progress in knowledge usually advanced in spite of academia rather than because of it.
Go read about the battles between Newton and Hooke or even Newton and Leibniz.
The doctor who first suggested washing hand to cut down on infections in the 1800s was ridiculed and mocked by surgeons.
Scientists who brought up germ theory were mocked as quacks by doctors and scientists who rigidly adhered to the miasma theory as gospel.
Of course white supremacy was accepted "scientific fact" for a very long time by academia and anyone who thought otherwise would have been viewed similarly to a flat earther today. You could argue that white supremacy would still be "scientific fact" were it not for ww2.
My personal favorite is Georg Cantor who was mercilessly attacked by his fellow academics within math and even without for his theories on infinite numbers.
"The objections to Cantor's work were occasionally fierce: Leopold Kronecker's public opposition and personal attacks included describing Cantor as a "scientific charlatan", a "renegade" and a "corrupter of youth".[8] Kronecker objected to Cantor's proofs that the algebraic numbers are countable, and that the transcendental numbers are uncountable, results now included in a standard mathematics curriculum. Writing decades after Cantor's death, Wittgenstein lamented that mathematics is "ridden through and through with the pernicious idioms of set theory", which he dismissed as "utter nonsense" that is "laughable" and "wrong".[9][context needed] Cantor's recurring bouts of depression from 1884 to the end of his life have been blamed on the hostile attitude of many of his contemporaries,[10] though some have explained these episodes as probable manifestations of a bipolar disorder"
"charlatan", "renegade", "corrupter of youth". Isn't it interesting how academics attack each other like religious people attack each other? The odd thing about some of the attacks on Cantor is that it came after his death and after he had PROVEN his countable and uncountable infinites.
The history of academia is as nasty and vicious as any other institution. And its gatekeepers and heroes as petty and pathetic as any you'd find anywhere else.
Let's not forget Ludwig Boltzmann, who derived the thermodynamic properties of gases assuming the existence of atoms:
' In 1904 at a physics conference in St. Louis most physicists seemed to reject atoms and he was not even invited to the physics section. Rather, he was stuck in a section called "applied mathematics" '
Things did not end well for Boltzmann [1].
And my favourite, John Bell, who was the first to understand the consequences of entanglement, in 1964. These ideas were met with derision by the mainstream for decades (citation needed.)
Funny how words meanings change in time. The original Plato's Academia vs today's academia. Socrates was a "corrupter of youth" too. The word "supremacy", as in "quantum supremacy" is much discussed now but why would anybody risk his career to complain about the alliance of ACM with Elsevier against Open Access?
> My personal favorite is Georg Cantor who was mercilessly attacked by his fellow academics within math and even without for his theories on infinite numbers.
I do not think this is comparable to other examples. Math is not science in the sense that its correctness is not determined by the outside reality, only by its internal consistency.
Different (finite vs infinite) axiomatizations leads to different classes of math structures, so it is only a matter of custom which structures are worthy of studying and how these 'leading' structures are defined.
And there is a point that if one studies countable structures (e.g. arithmetics or graph theory) then using arguments from infinite set theory (e.g. ZFC) is overkill. We do not know whether such theory is consistent and if it is not, then most likely much simpler theories covering the countable structures would still be consistent.
The groupthink and publishing pressure are also problems, but they're very secondary to hellish career conditions.