Questions closed for this reason mainly come in two categories:
- The answer depends on a lot of individual factors. This is the typical “Decide my life for me” question.
- The answer depends completely on a single factor.
The question in question would fall into the second category and I don’t see how it differs relevantly from other questions in this category.
To take an arbitrary example for comparison:
Do I have to take a seminar course?
There is little more to answer than: “It depends.” Answering questions with this gets annoying very quickly.
The close reason answers the question as good as we can.
The question is slightly helpful to others in the same situation, telling them whom they need to ask.
If somebody oblivious of academia’s inhomogeneity answers this question from personal experience, it’s misleading.
There is a plethora of similar, but not-exactly-duplicate questions that suffer from the same problem (e.g., you can ask one about every detail of the graduation ceremony).
The asker is probably not aware that academia differs in this aspect.
If there is a big difference anywhere, it’s in the last point, as in your example question, the asker cannot to be blamed for being naïve.
But then, we (and other SE sites) do from time to time close questions where the asker cannot be reasonably aware of the problem, for example too-broad questions where an outsider cannot reasonably expect that there are entire books covering the topic.
This is one of those cases, where I would advocate upvoting the question despite voting to close it – which also ensures that the question does not get automatically deleted and thus remains visible to future visitors.
Sidenote: The situation of many not-exactly-duplicate questions suggests canonical Q&As at first glance, but do we really want canonical questions where the answer is little more than “it depends”? Also, the number of such questions may be very high, considering the number of bullet points to Academia varies more than you think it does (and that’s not an exhaustive list).