I should preface this by saying that I am in my late 30s - old enough to be established in academia, but young enough to be worried about how much worse things are going to get before I'm old enough to retire. I have my PhD, and have supervised several since. I'm lucky that my own PhD students have been exceptional (no credit to me, they were simply brilliant thinkers in their own right), but I'm becoming increasingly aware that this is often not the case with other new PhD candidates, both in my field (philosophy) and beyond it, and especially at lower-tier institutions. I've read the output of some recent PhD graduates, and been horrified by the low quality of work, as well as the low standards some new PhD candidates are being held to in terms of dissertation lengths and timeframes for completion.
(ETA: I'm thinking about this mostly as it related to fields where working in academia, rather than industry, is a common goal.)

Too many students being allowed into PhD programs is creating a surplus of junior academics that the academic job market has no room for, and while the obvious solution would be to limit entry to PhD programs to only the most exceptional candidates, universities seem to have no interest in that. Nor do they seem to be interested in raising the standards for actually staying in a PhD program and eventually being awarded the degree, so as to weed out those candidates producing sub-par work. Meanwhile some of the potential PhD students who might actually be capable of brilliant work are questioning whether or not they should bother (or even actively declining) to try to do one, because social media is overflowing with negative tales from recent PhD graduates who are struggling to get academic jobs because they've produced sub-quality PhD work. (I feel it's necessary to add that I know that's far from the only reason people struggle to get academic jobs, but it's inarguably a contributing factor for many.)

I feel like any time I try to broach this topic, people just get angry and say I'm being elitist, but I'm sure I can't be alone in these frustrations. Does anybody here have these same concerns? What solutions should we be aiming towards?