That's my point, they aren't needed. Maybe my perspective is different as I went to a more research oriented and competitive school. I certainly know people who were disappointed to find what industry was like. Even those that got jobs in fields like machine learning that do need a degree don't get to do innovative things and say it feels more like doing similar tasks in different contexts. E.g preparing multiple different ML algorithms for different data sets using similar techniques.

At companies however you are right loads of people even those with a CS degree don't care about doing science and love having a career out of what they do.

Countries like China are investing a lot in research these days and I do fear that if western countries don't ramp up R&D in things other than defense spending we will be left behind in the future.

This problem is a thousand times worse in say physics and chemistry, lots of people do it for their passion.