PhD thesis are overrated. People create some kind of life achievement monument where they seek to summarize the world knowledge and yet nobody is going to read

PhD thesis are overrated. People create some kind of life achievement monument where they seek to summarize the world knowledge and yet nobody is going to read the document. Same for MSc thesis. What matters (to a point) are your papers and it should be enough to just gather the in a file, add a conclusion and call it a day. We have this in France and some people use the opportunity. My PhD thesis (physics) was 45 pages long. The expected number of pages was about 200 or 300, a friend of mine wrote two tomes. The introduction was basically "if you do not know about the topic you should probably to read this thesis anyway but if you really want to, here are some books you can use". 2 lines, introduction done. The main part was mostly copy/paste from my articles. The conclusion was that the results were great and groundbreaking. I added a special section called (I think) "Is this thesis really useful, a discussion with the author" - where I pointed out everything wrong with what I did and where to go further. 75% of the reviewers loved it (less work for them) and 25% were wrong :) Finally, the acknowledgments were thanking my thesis director profusely (he did not help me much in the research part but eased considerably (considerably) my life and helped me to navigate the muddy waters of Academia), a fried who during a dinner gave me an idea that changed the whole thesis, my wife, my parents and my dog. The defense was epic (3 hours instead o the expected 45 minutes) because some people decided to manage their political battles there. I was switching between grabbing the popcorn and mopping my forehead when some questions out of the end of the universe were asked (one of them was asked by the dept asshole in residence (AIR) and I understood all the words, but not put together in one sentence (nothing to do with my topic). The president of the jury waited for me to answer, I mumbled something, he said that this was disappointing and asked the AIR to answer. He said that he has no idea but thought I may.) I will go one day to my dept (I left academia in the meantime) and ask if someone has ever borrowed the thesis (it exists only in one copy).