Context: This meme really speaks to me. My experience as a PhD student was that typical contract durations are poorly aligned with the amount of time it takes today to publish academic articles.
PhD students are often expected to complete their doctorate within three (or slightly more) years—ideally with several journal publications. At the same time, many of these papers spend what feels like an eternity under review. From my perspective, the core problem is not the long review times themselves. Especially today, careful and thorough peer review is both necessary and desirable.
The structural issue lies instead in the (at least in Germany) short-term contracts, which are simply incompatible with these publication cycles. A pragmatic solution—at least in my field—is to publish papers initially as working papers. Accordingly, I have seen publication statuses such as “forthcoming” or “in preparation” at several PhD defenses (including my own). However, this never felt particularly satisfying to me.