At the office you do 40 hours a week making bank, doing a PhD you live it 24/7 at will be lucky to save. You listen to your friends talk about their vacation, hobbies, and families. You are uncertainty about you abilities, in addition to willful academic fraud. Then you depend on an adviser who views you as a tool for personal glory, and doesn't feel morally obligated to act different because they were treated in the same manner. The only thing that will get you through is love of your work but you most likely already compromised on those dreams. This is the experience of many PhD in the physical sciences, who do experiments all day and will never become professors.

I took more or less one of the paths described in the article (internship -> undergrad -> drop out -> startup -> startup -> startup -> research lab), and everything seems like a mess in its own way and I feel like why I'm not wrapping burritos now is out of luck/ meeting people along the way/ hacking my way through this mess.

At this point, I can't imagine going to academia or industry through traditional means, it's just too much of a mental drain to watch how expectations don't match reality in everything around me, despite being pitched constantly on otherwise.