Anyone who can achieve results without suffering the same tribulations to join the ranks of professors is a threat at best, a charlatan at worst, and to be dismissed regardless.
And even in more computer-adjacent fields, this is still ridiculously reductive. Geoff Hinton is an academic through-and-through, and he changed the world even for computer scientists. What about someone like Don Knuth? I mean, even google's pagerank started as an academic project.
Engineering firms do great research too, but this is not the only way.
if you think CRISPR or P1 transduction were discovered outside academia, you are wrong. and this isn't even discussing stuff with no immediate clinical applications that is nonetheless important (jumbo phages, asgard archaea are hot rn)
A large part of the electorate distrusts academics and is in turn dismissive of academics’ priorities and recommendations. It’s correct for members of the public to distrust institutions that are not earnest.
The casualties are, of course, enormous.
What do you want to do?
Get a billion dollar to get a new particle collider? Buy 1000 lab rats and try some experiment? Get 3 graduate students to expand your personal theory? -> The answer is no. But even someone with credentials will have a hard time getting that unless they have a good team and track record in similar task.
A position as a collaborator in a research group? -> Perhaps. As a full researcher is difficult but not impossible. The main problem is to ensure you know everything that "everyone" already know. You must start with a small collaboration in a side task. Also, there are many positions in helper task, like sysadmin or lathe expert or ... that don't require a Ph.D. but they require someone who really knows what is doing and can understand both the requirements of the team and the tools.
Publish your own research? -> Possible, if you pay for the 1000 rats yourself. The main problem is that what is "useful", "interesting" and "interesting for academia" may have a weird intersection. So you may get something that is useful or interesting but nobody in academia may care about it. Or you may reinvent the wheel with another name. Or the theory is "obviously wrong". Do you have a control group? There is a finite time to read new ideas, so people in academia has to filter too weird theories (even weird theories published in papers). Sometimes the theory that is obviously wrong is correct, but most of the time is just wrong. Does the new theory has at least one experimental prediction?
In some cases is like wanting to be a F1 racer. Nobody will give you a position unless you are an expert F2 racer (or something).
On the other hand, pg published "A plan for spam" in a blog post. No new academic research. No new weird structure. Nothing new. Just useful when nobody knew how to deal with spam. Also, cperciva made a comment a few weeks ago telling that his most cited "paper" is only a "preprint" that was never accepted for publication, because nobody care about a weird side channel timing attack (or something like that, I can't find the comment).
There is definitively a problem, but a few years ago got we got in our university like 5 independent persons that solved the Goldbach conjeture. Each one got a voluntary graduate student to talk and explain the ideas. After a few month of meetings, the conclusion was that none of them had good ideas to prove the Goldbach conjeture.
What do you want to do?