What's notable here is not that academia is so great, but that becoming an employee has become so bad.

In the Bell Labs days, before our economy got taken over by criminals, smart employees really were treated as researchers-in-residence who could mostly pick and choose their projects. They didn't have as much freedom as tenured professors--they still had to work on things the company cared about--but they had a level of autonomy that, these days, doesn't really exist.