That’s not true at all. You certainly do not need a PhD in those fields and I have plenty of former coworkers to prove it. And there’s nothing “nowadays” about it. The PhD has always been the accepted research degree. Really, the entire point of a PhD is learning how to research; learning how to learn. Sure you become a subject matter expert along the way, but the reason the PhD is and has always been the research degree is because if you come from a reputable program/advisor, you have already proven that you can basically take yourself and a research project from the point where almost nothing is known through to completion where something valuable is known. That’s a valuable ability for academic, government, and industrial research departments.
However, particularly in industrial R&D, groups typically only need so many PhDs to direct their research, and if you happen to be one of them, you don’t always want or need more PhDs to come in to help your group complete its work. More often you need candidates that are at least familiar with the research process and have proven that they have the skills you need and can learn new ones, especially in a research context. Enter thesis-based master’s degrees.
This is assuming that you view education (or at least MS degrees) solely on a monetary basis, which is not always wise. If your goal is to get an MS just to bump you up the pay scale, then yes, getting a thesis-based degree is a waste. That’s not the only potential benefit of the MS, though. As I mentioned before, a thesis-based degree offers a whole bunch of potential new skills, both practical and theoretical, to the students that they aren’t going to get with a coursework-only degree, plus it exposes them to the research process. This can absolutely give them a leg up for certain jobs. In some situations, those degrees absolutely carry more weight than the non-thesis varieties. In many situations they seem to be on equal footing.
In other words, the student really just needs to sit down and think about what they actually want out of their degree. If it is basically just a rubber stamp on the way to advancement, then by all means, take the one-year, company-funded degree and move on with your life. It would be silly to waste extra time with a thesis in this case from both a monetary and temporal standpoint. However, if your goal is to expand your own capabilities such that you can open up new classes of jobs for yourself, then a thesis-based degree may be the correct path, even though there is an opportunity cost involved.
This isn’t a black and white issue and talking about master’s degrees solely on a monetary basis does a disservice to them and to students.