Does the salary compensate the amount of effort to get there though?

I had a friend who was a chemist but she left the field to pursue data science instead after her pharmaceutical company started even more layoffs in R+D - it seems pharma companies are more interested in intellectual property law than drug development these days.

This seems more like a reason to avoid Chemistry than to get a PhD.

On other hand, are the jobs that are not those jobs much worse? For pay and career development at least? Counting the 3-4 years you have extra experience in industry.

In my experience, civil engineering may not have cross-topic applicability like some other engineering disciplines. For example, someone with a PhD in concrete may not be able to jump to hydrology. But am industrial engineer who did a PhD in healthcare optimization could more easily parlay that into other optimization work. A aerospace PhD could work on windmill design, etc.