If the suggestion is a return to a guilded age where masters have more interns and apprentices perhaps we should not turn to Spolsky for things other than how to stop sucking at excel.
The academic job market is an absolute shitshow though. The academy pretty quickly realized that apprentices were cheap labor, while masters were very expensive but could train multiple apprentices at once (especially if they take on several journeymen/postdocs). The result is an extreme overproduction of apprentices and journeymen, with a very limited pool of available master positions available to them on the other end. Lots of people work very hard, for a very long time, and still get stuck in this daisy chain of highly-precarious $60k-$80k/yr 2-year contracts that can last another decade or more. Industry is sort of capitalizing on this imbalance right now (my pet theory is that this is a major cause of the data science/ML/AI boom in the last decade), but I wouldn’t call the model overall “successful”.
Although I did enjoy my PhD, I wouldn't recommend it if you have marketable, in-demand industry skills. Especially for international students, a PhD, and especially a postdoc, is akin to indentured servitude. You can't leave, you barely make do, and your success is very dependents on the whims of your advisor. It is no coincidence that depression is a common problem in PhD student population.
