> Most thesis are never read because anything worth sharing with the wider world ( and some that isn't ) is highly likely to have been published as a paper - not because the work in thesis has no value.

Yes - my wife’s advisor literally told her that the goal should be getting as close as you could to stapling your published papers together with an introduction. They saw this as recognizing that you had learned how to ask good questions, run experiments, and iterate on the results — and since their field had fairly expensive overhead requirements everyone was mindful of the need to repeatedly get grants to keep the experiments running.