This style of editorial is becoming more common, and IMO is almost useless. Saying that "Advisors should take care of their students' well-being." doesn't account for the fact that incentives are for advisors to overpromise to funding agencies and drive their students hard to make up the difference. They control funding/compensation, graduation, and paper piblication/author order, and are set to personally benefit from faster results at higher difficulties.

In my advisor's lab, this was done by encouraging competition between students. If a student didn't make experimental progress in a month, a second student was told to work on the same problem. If that didn't work, he would collaborate with postdocs in other labs, sharing ideas and results to get high impact publications quickly. Students needed to publish results as first authors to graduate, so becoming a mere coauthor on someone else's publication after a year of work was a huge setback. One (independemtly wealthy) student was desperate to graduate and published as a first author through another lab with our advisor as a coauthor, and was told that the paper would not be counted. I don't know a single student who graduated without having a breakdown on the way, but the professor in question has become quite famous and received many awards and fellowships in professional organizations for their high-impact work, the department is becoming famous in that field, and the funding agencies have extended funding to pay for five more years with 50% more students.

These hand-wringing editorials suggest nothing that will change incentives or hold ruthless PIs accountable.