One slight saving grace (after having graduated) is to feel fine writing documents like papers and just putting them up on https://arxiv.org/ under my own terms.

One additional technique I learned from others is to use submissions to conferences as a way to get feedback on your work without any expectation that it gets accepted. You do that early knowing there are flaws, but do it to get early warnings from reviewers about rejection points.

Now you could do the same being outside academia, as a way to get feedback on something and then just call it “done” on some paper on your terms.