[mudrockbestgirl]

I didn't say you cannot publish without a PhD. Rather, it's incredibly difficult to get a position in a good research lab without a PhD due to market forces and competition. Publishing in top venues also requires a certain skillset that's difficult to self-study... and these days it often requires money for running experiments. And if you don't want to get position in a research lab / academia, why would you want to publish at all? Getting those citations for your job is the whole point. Otherwise you can just write blog posts.