Only reason should be that you want to be a professor, research can be done in private companies without this license. 95% of a PhD is worth as much as 0%.
This is less of a problem than you might imagine. While no school will guarantee to give you a degree regardless of your performance, it's pretty close. They don't offer the limited funded spots to anyone they don't think can make it.
The real compromises are that people go into their PhD thinking they're going to cure cancer and become a professor at Harvard, and come out of it having made a 5% improvement to a model for predicting the risk of one particular complication following treatment for one particular type of cancer, knowing that becoming a professor at Podunk College would take another decade of work. Or the decide to quit once they discover the reality of it.
The under-paid indefinite purgatory period is called the postdoc.
Now, if your PhD is in the humanities, you're not looking at the same situation. It's almost bizarre they call the degree the same name, since a PhD in the humanities takes you on a completely different path. I don't think many companies are demanding a History or English or German literature PhD. Sometimes this can make you a competitive candidate for a job in a completely unrelated field, but those jobs have no need for a PhD, it's just something that makes you stand out when 100 overqualified people are applying for the same job. So will a candidate working in the Peace Corps. Or volunteering hundreds of hours a year. Those getting a history PhD are competing for the...what, 60? 90? jobs in the entire nation that require a history PhD, which is being a professor that gives other people history PhDs. So of course, you will only get such a job if you go to a top 10 school, and the chances of this are basically less than becoming a professional athlete. So the vast disparity between a humanities PhD which has no sustainable aspirational track, vs. a STEM PhD where you become a qualified candidate for both academia/the government which hires many PhDs, and industry, which also has a demand for PhD-trained candidates. Probably 3/4 of STEM PhDs don't work for a school or the government.
Later I worked with PhDs and PhD candidates in a university setting. What shocked me the most was the narrowness of their knowledge and their lack of consideration for practical matters.
I'd rather let the market judge my work than an academic committee.