Toxic: That won't be fixed until they start firing tenured profs for abusing grad students. Nothing else will do.
Broken: There's no route to professorship for most grad students, ever. We either need far bigger universities, or far fewer grad students.
I don't get the impression that everyone becomes a manager in software, not everyone becomes a line manager in a factory. Not every wants to become CEO eventually. Why should academia be any different?
In Germany for one we used to have positions at universities that focused exclusively on teaching. That was, like, their specialty. And frankly a lot of researchers shouldn't be teaching, they only do it because there's nobody else left to do it.
Perhaps the real difference is how Germany treats workers.
The US has community colleges, that focus on teaching. In my state, the community college teachers are unionized, and teaching is treated more like a career.
Disclosure: I was an adjunct for a semester at a Big Ten university, more than 25 years ago. My spouse has worked there as a non-faculty researcher since that time.
It’s a system that we might want to try here in the USA, but it doesn’t coddle students.
There's value to graduate/post graduate education other than a chance of tenure. I'd assume many do MSc/PhD without an expectation to become a prof, or work in academia at all (like I and most of my peers did).
What seems to be the problem is the lack of a clear indication that only few percent student have a chance of ever becoming a professor, or students' wishful thinking on the matter.
What we really need is for professors to produce fewer PhDs over their career. When each professor produces 20 PhDs, you need an exponentially increasing number of professorships. That number needs to be closer to 2.