By this definition any form of research or speculative R&D is a "make belief" job. Despite the dramatic advances made by people in those occupations on any given day if they went home no additional suffering would result.
The premise of this piece suffers from immediacy bias and is in my opinion ridiculous.
If the people who came up with "Monday" as the new name for PricewaterhouseCoopers had all gone home, no extra suffering.
Besides the article explicitly includes academia as a made up job.
Firstly, I disagree with the specifics of your counter; I disagree that industrialising antibiotic production is some kind of academic exercise. That's just a specific, though; I'm inferring that's what you're saying, from your comment on academia. Maybe that's not what you're saying?
My larger disagreement; I think the article isn't about the individuals. It's about the work. The article asks "if you stopped doing your work, and nobody replaced you, how much suffering would that cause?" If nobody industrialised antibiotic production, the additional suffering is huge. It's not about deciding that one person went down a research dead-end and therefore that job is a made-up job. I don't need hindsight to identify that industrialising antibiotic production is a less made-up job than renaming PwC "Monday".
Of course I’ve seen poor branding bring down companies so I don’t consider it a made up job. Certainly if the company goes under due to lack of customers all the employees will suffer.
In a highly interconnected world it’s not sufficient to show a job doesn’t produce direct value to prove it is pointless.