This is the first fundamental flaw of the article

> Bob's weekly updates to his supervisor were indistinguishable from Alice's. The questions were similar. The progress was similar. The trajectory, from the outside, was identical.

No they won't be. They might be worse. They might be better. But they'll be very different.

And, like you said...

> Alice and Bob had the same year. One paper each.

No they won't. Alice would've taken a year. Bob would've taken a few days.

You've already covered why that might actually be OK, so I'll talk about the author's other error:

> This sounds idealistic until you think about what astrophysics actually is. Nobody's life depends on the precise value of the Hubble constant. No policy changes if the age of the Universe turns out to be 13.77 billion years instead of 13.79. Unlike medicine, where a cure for Alzheimer's would be invaluable regardless of whether a human or an AI discovered it, astrophysics has no clinical output. The results, in a strict practical sense, don't matter. What matters is the process of getting them: the development and application of methods, the training of minds, the creation of people who know how to think about hard problems. If you hand that process to a machine, you haven't accelerated science. You've removed the only part of it that anyone actually needed.

Keep asking why. why does the development of the application and methods, the training of minds matter?

the goal isn't abstract. The goal is still ultimately for the benefit of humanity, just like the cure for Alzheimer's.

Humanity learned physics, so we made rockets and now we have satellites, and the entire planet is connected with communication and information.

Humanity must continue to invest in astrophysics so that we do not get wiped out by a single rogue asteroid barreling through the cosmos, like the dinosaurs did.

Now i'm not saying that there isn't other benefit to making generically intelligent humans that know how to think. But at the end of the day, the purpose of astrophysics is no less existential than the purpose for developing medicine.

I want to know the age of the universe so that we can understand what created it, and if we can reverse entropy, and if there is anything beyond the universe. That is a quest for humanity that will take hundreds if not millions of years.