Your supervisor may not understand this until it’s too late, and you may not have the ability to judge your adviser's ability to do so until you are committed.
The main problem is that you were raised in a school system where if you show up, study and do your assignments you are pretty much guaranteed to succeed sooner or later. A PhD is not like that.
But as you said, a PhD is quite different than all schooling before that. And that's good. A PhD is supposed to signify that you contributed new scientific value as judged by the expert international community, not just your teacher. Of course there are many wrinkles on this story like sloppy knee-jerk reviews etc.
But anything in life where you "just show up" and fulfill some explicit assignments tends not to be very valuable. If just showing up and doing what someone else decided for you is enough for a thing, that thing will lose value very soon. Similarly if you make sure almost everyone can do it, it won't have value, but will become a participation trophy.
But nothing in real life work like that. School is fake. You don't get a job just by showing up or having a diploma. Nobody will fall in love and start a relationship/family with you for showing up and fulfilling some list of criteria. Nobody will fund your startup or strike a business deal with your company because you showed up and did some assigned tasks.
In almost all aspects of life being proactive and exercising agency will get you much further than the teacher's pet mindset that school instills. And unfortunately rather than selecting for it, the PhD selects against such agency again because it's the safe option and people who are ready for an adventure usually dislike the academic environment. Not all of couse, I obviously don't mean every single person fits this. But in my experience this explains part of the mismatch in expectations and reality for the "I was a good student so a PhD felt natural" people. Not those come into the PhD with a well thought out plan, and knowing exactly why they want to pursue it, the upsides and downsides etc.
The "date-me doc" community might disagree:
* https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/02/style/date-me-docs.html
* https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/in-defense-of-describable-d...
* https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comment...
Including paramedic or trauma surgeon, where the explicit assignment is to stabilize the human being in front of you?
Or how about plumber, to stop water where it shouldn't be, making it come out faucets and go down drains where it should? Had furnace issues when we switched it on in October, the HVAC technicians made the magic box generate warm air: his explicit assignment was 'make the house warm' and he showed up and did that.
And in some sense we can make the PhD requirements explicit too: prove that you are able to provide valuable and novel contributions to the scientific community as recognized by them. But it's not box ticking. But so is becoming an especially appreciated and respected doctor in your city. It's not just don't kill too many patients and you're golden.
If you want a mediocre run of the mill PhD it's not super hard. It is hard, but not super hard if you have academic aptitude. You can do something incremental and follow the trends, and eventually some venue will publish it. Not many will read it though and you won't become a leading voice though. There are many incremental paper that help many average PhD students get their degrees.
There are plenty of other non academic fields where you have to work hard and long hours, such as finance or law firms. You can choose less demanding alternatives too but they are less prestigious. Of course finance pays better.
I think the problem is that people want to treat a scientific career as both a regular job and also as something of a pop star personal brand type of thing, and they only want the upside of both.
There are many problems with academia, power balance etc of course. It's not unlike problems for aspiring movie stars or in other somewhat isolated bubbles within society like in sports or the theater scene, or how kitchens work in high end restaurants etc etc. If you want to become an acclaimed top expert in a subfield, it's not easy. And humans are going to do their human things around such opportunities for status advancements.
It was not my case and bold of you to assume so. I had peer-reviewed publications before I even applied for PhD.
While I do know some people who expected PhD to be "more classes with more difficult assignments", the mast majority of PhDs I know had nothing to do with mentality you described.
I’m aware the experience will not be the same everywhere as PhD programs can be quite different, but many students that asked me if they should do a PhD are surprised when I tell them it’s not just up to the university or their advisors that they will get their degree and even more surprised when I tell them how early they have to start submitting their papers.
Even though I was well warned by my seniors, I admit that I also had this misconception to some degree.
1. You can hedge your bets by submitting your work to various conferences of various qualities (without going 3rd-tier, you can bet across 1st-tier and 2nd-tier)
2. You can spend time choosing the professor and the topic before going all in
3. You can seek advice and social interactions within your research group, departement and school
None of this is a silver bullet, but it compounds in the right direction.
To a point. If you stray too far from your personal interest, you increase the risk of burnout.
It depends highly on the field. In history, sure. The point of getting a history PhD is to become a history professor, and you can't do that if you don't get the PhD, and meanwhile history PhDs don't meaningfully open up any other job prospects, so attempting and failing to get a PhD provides negative value.
In CS and many engineering disciplines, there is a long history of people dropping out of PhDs and landing in industry. The industry is therefore much more accustomed to, and therefore accommodating to, people taking this path. Whether it's a maximally efficient use of time is another question, but it's certainly not wasted effort.
But I do agree that it's stressful nonetheless because it still feels like a failure even if it is not actually in reality. I wrote about this when I put down my own PhD journey here [1]. In particular after the control replication (2017) paper, I very nearly quit out of academia entirely despite it being my biggest contribution to the field by far.
[1]: https://elliottslaughter.com/2024/02/legion-paper-history (written without any use of LLMs, for anyone who is wondering)
My advisor was well established, tenured prof with a number of students. I had to teach, but the effort was light. We taught large, basic courses that are boring for tenured profs. We usually requested the same 1-2 classes to teach and after the first round had all the materials (homework, quizzes, etc.) and could teach on autopilot. University gave us undergrad graders to grade assignments but I never used them since I wanted to see what my students wrote. Which is a testament that the load was light; if I was drowning I would use all free help I could.
But there was a cult of academia. "Get an academic job or you are a loser" mentality was prevalent. My advisor was disappointed, but OK when I decided to go into industry after PhD, but a friend's (Physics PhD from Harvard, CEO of a profitable startup now) advisor does not talk to him anymore because he did not stay in academia.
And I only realized long after finishing my PhD how incredibly lonely PhD path is. You live in your bubble for years, with minimal interactions outside a few other folks at the same grad school. Stipend was enough for basic living, but not much else. No good vacations, ski trips with friends, etc. And a few somewhat creepy characters that grow in this lifestyle. This is all surmountable, but the mental toughness required is certainly something to keep in mind. I did not have that mental toughness, but was an introvert, which helped a lot. But looking back I see that I also could have gone off the rails. My 2c.