The purpose of hiring grad students isn’t to advance science, it’s to train experts.
It's 90% to advance science via cheap labor and 10% to train a small group of future experts who will hire grad students to 90% advance science via cheap labor etc. ...
Yes. They have grad students too. This is just like having more grad students that don't need to be trained so the work you can get done is not bottlenecked by the number of people you can train.