I feel like you're giving advice on how to become a PhD student, and frankly, that's not the point of the question, and if it is: any grad student who can't read papers should ask their advisor for advice.
So I take OP's perspective to be from a practitioner (such as myself). Apart from my colleagues in R&D, we aren't called upon to write new papers that demands expertise in ever increasing narrowness. Instead we are to solve the needs of the product, usually regardless of specific expertise. So we need to be more broadly equipped, as it's typically better to have a screwdriver and a hammer and a screwdriver in the toolbox than a ten different screwdriver bits of varying niche application.
As an example, the TD-IDF paper curated in [1] has been broadly useful as a log analysis tool to surface interesting log lines and remove the mundane common "error" logs. There's been many advancements since then, using bayesian techniques or deep learning, but this one is simple enough and cheap enough to deploy.
Old ideas that were good but didn't become common/standard are something I run across a fair bit in papers and yeah, they're often way behind the state of the art but also a lot easier for me to understand/implement and far better than the relatively naive approach I'd've taken otherwise.
So I take OP's perspective to be from a practitioner (such as myself). Apart from my colleagues in R&D, we aren't called upon to write new papers that demands expertise in ever increasing narrowness. Instead we are to solve the needs of the product, usually regardless of specific expertise. So we need to be more broadly equipped, as it's typically better to have a screwdriver and a hammer and a screwdriver in the toolbox than a ten different screwdriver bits of varying niche application.
As an example, the TD-IDF paper curated in [1] has been broadly useful as a log analysis tool to surface interesting log lines and remove the mundane common "error" logs. There's been many advancements since then, using bayesian techniques or deep learning, but this one is simple enough and cheap enough to deploy.