eh, yea and no. trust me as someone who has been in both academia and public and private organizations, academia is significantly better for autism. unless you're in a position to be a single hyper focused neet with all that entails (and even then...) it's one of the few places i've found that lets you just sperg out for an entire career and be paid for it.  the only other places like it are just academia 2.0 like national and defense labs or corporate r&d facilities which have high bars of entry (i.e., to have influence, you need a stem phd).  you're right that it's not really a marker of high tier intelligence (i personally look at exactly what people studied during their education more so than grades or publications), but it is a barrier. also hard stem phds are minimum iq bars simply because of the math involved (anyone intimately involved with mathematics is multiple cuts above pretty much everyone else in a candidate pool in terms of iq).  it's interesting to see the shift in academia's relevance it is both simultaneously overblown in terms of significance and undervalued depending on who is talking. very few people understand what is actually evaluated in hard stem graduate programs, what skills are actually and what skills are not gained.
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