...unless you are in Europe, where it's an almost required gate to upper management.

The main reason to do a PhD is for your own personal drive and satisfaction. Unless you value the work for its own sake, it is unlikely to pay off.

Degree-less person here and vehemently disagree. Maybe across the field in general, but some of the most interesting areas of work have Ph.Ds and/or significant levels of domain experience as gatekeepers.

Nah. Many high tech fields in the private sector recruit PhDs for research positions. Intel for example has a ton of them.

Generally speaking, you should get the qualifications you need for the job you want. If you want to be a software developer or program manager, a B.Sc. is sufficient and a PhD is overkill and a waste of time. If you want to be an academic or a scientist in industry, a PhD is essentially required.

Even better: get into the PhD program and then drop out. You have all the signalling of being selected in a fancy PhD, but it also shows that you're practical and interested in work and industry.

Anec-data: me and several other PhD folks who all dropped out of CS/Stats/ML and got plenty of offers for jobs and funding. :)