Why does that matter, though?
Those people are technical specialists. In order to understand or engage with their work, you would need to be educated in their field. There are people, some of whom are household names, who specialize in the breaking scientific knowledge down into a form the general public can understand. That is called science communication, and it requires a very different set of skills to being a researcher.
This is true in all fields. There are books you sell in bookstores and there are books you sell to academic libraries, and not everyone is equally skilled at writing both. One is written to entertain a general audience and perhaps help them become more knowledgeable and well-rounded people, the other is written for an audience of technical specialists.
The problem here, and it's actually much worse in non-STEM fields, is that most developed countries have far more PhDs than research positions. Research in general is no longer a career, it is an expensive hobby that you may one day earn a bit of money from.
Noone goes into research for the money. They go into research because they want to make a difference, because they like the work or because of the sunk cost fallacy of having done a PhD. If you want to look at this from a purely instrumental standpoint, then doing a PhD is basically entering yourself into a self-selected sample of people who don't mind spending obscene amounts of money for the prestige that comes from being a very highly educated specialist, and I say this as someone who is about to get one.
But let's be honest. The typical person picking STEM as an undergraduate is not the kind of person who is going to end up doing research. People go into STEM because they think it will lead to a high paying career, and research is not a high paying career. In this regard, my feeling is that STEM fields are actually a victim of their reputation. The typical STEM graduate is not someone who is thoughtful or intellectually curious. Frankly, they're often the kind of person higher education is wasted on and would be better off doing an evening course in the specific vocational skills they want to develop.
I feel like this is a common misconception.
If by art degrees you mean things like fine art or music, then no. Those are degrees that require a serious time commitment because they involve the use of skills that you have to practice continuously.
But the reason things like humanities and social sciences have relatively low contact time is because those courses place a high emphasis on independent study. Students being students, many will only do the bare minimum (which is still going to come to an hour or two each day) but you're supposed to do much more and in my experience the better students do grasp the point of the system and learn what is expected of them.
Lecturers and tutorials in these courses are supplementary. They are meant to guide independent study and give students a place to ask questions and resolve problems they encounter. The part that actually matters is the reading. You can't reference your lectures in your coursework (although I've seen people try).
In fact, one of the most rewarding parts of teaching undergraduates in the humanities is that you watch these people grow from children who have spent their whole lives learning to regurgitate information on command and follow basic instructions into independent-minded young adults. The knowledge they learn isn't actually important, no airline staff are ever going to get on the intercom and ask if anyone on the plane is an anthropologist. The point is that they've learned a new way of thinking that they can use to evaluate any information and draw reasonable conclusions. A lot of STEM graduates I've met just seem like they never went through that process, and frankly they're worse off for it.
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