> He had a plum position, and he was years away from tenure review. It’s hard to walk away from a place like that after a lifetime of striving.
The nominal academic career is ~45 years, as successful academics rarely retire early. In most fields, getting a tenure-track faculty job signals the transition from early to mid-career. But this seems to be about CS in the US, where it's common to get a faculty job with minimal postdoctoral experience. Getting tenure is then the true starting point for mid-career, and this was more likely about an early-career researcher choosing to leave the academia.
> Academics for their part tend to lean into this by playing the “let’s see how quickly I can destroy this entire presentation” game.
There are some toxic fields of research, but I don't think this attitude is particularly common in the academia. There are many fields with a true sense of community. People generally realize that it's better to be nice to your colleagues, even if you are competing against them, because you will be stuck with them for decades.
> Academia is characterized by well-trodden problems, hashed over for decades, and negligible novel data for resolving them.
Here my experience is the opposite. The academia is characterized by world's top experts in a narrow niche investigating speculative problems few people have any idea of. More often than not, that research turns out to be a dead end, "wasting" years of work.