Yes, to actually improve the state of the art, you start a PhD, I agree. But there's still also a lot of work that people can do applying the "Github repositor

Yes, to actually improve the state of the art, you start a PhD, I agree. But there's still also a lot of work that people can do applying the "Github repositories" to new problems. And to do that effectively, you also have to know stuff (e.g. you need to be able to read the most recent research, now when tool X is appropriate over tool Y, know what preprocessing makes sense in a given situation, etc). There's money to be made there and people want to do that work.