It really doesn't help to focus on hours spent reading either.
If your hour is spent doing low quality things then that doesn't get you anywhere either.
You need to focus on high quality more than anything else. There are no other metrics which will help.

dummythings, you asked for brutal feedback and here it is.

Your attitude is appalling.

You mention that you graduated from a Russell Group university. Presumably you mentioned this because you feel that this is something special? Unless you came from Oxford or Cambridge you have come from nowhere special. There is a sense of entitlement from your post which should be a serious concern to you if you wish to be successful at anything.

That PI you have just discredited has a string of published material and a full time permanent job which she undoubtedly has had to fight very hard to get. I am presuming you have neither of these things and so it's very odd that you feel capable of having a go at her career choices.

Let me give you some advice. Lose the attitude immediately. Forget league tables and impact factors, get your arse in gear and start proving your worth. The clock is ticking on your PhD already and you appear to have spent most of the first week engaged in idle gossip and social status nonsense. Finally, you appear to be easily manipulated. Stop believing everything your idiotic lab colleagues say, keep your counsel and start making up your own mind about things.

If you were in my lab, I'd be taking you for a coffee and a very serious chat about your attitude. I'd be failing you if I didn't at least try and talk some sense into you.

You did ask for brutal and honest....

It's not a "boring" measurement. It's an almost useless measurement which can de-rail your PhD.
By all means go your own way on this but you should exercise caution.

I had this problem too. My solution was to stop asking that person for help because they would have a solution on my desk by morning.
I kept my progress to myself, under-reported what I was doing and kept communications to a minimum. Any questions were kept vague and I stopped revealing my plans for the week or month ahead. I also talked to others in their presence about unrelated work to send a message that I had other issues. The co-supervisor lost interest pretty quickly.

Try to figure out why the co-sup is doing this. Boredom with their own work? They see a chance of getting a quick paper? They use you as a chance to deflect from difficulties in their own work? Knowing this will help you deal with the problem.

Talking about how many pages to read per day reminds me of the discussion about how many hours to work per week.
Neither is a particularly helpful metric and leads to a box ticking mentality. This in turn gets you absolutely nowhere fast.

You should identify more meaningful task-based metrics. i.e. Mastering a particular programming language etc.
Time-based metrics are the root of all evil in my experience. Setting them is the easiest way to suck the life from anything you do, turning enjoyment into a grade A chore.

Your last two sentences sum up the problem here.
That sounds like a huge number of emails for you to be sending.
A PhD is completely different from industry and you would be expected to be more independent.
To give an example, I met with my supervisor once every 6 to 8 weeks for about 3 hours with only a single email summarising my progress and to book him for a chat. He didn't expect to hear from me anymore than that and if it had been up to me I'd have kept our meetings to once every 6 months and only when I needed it.

I don't think I ever got a response to an email unless I was setting up a meeting or asking him a rare direct question.

I finished just over two years ago.
I went into it for very specific reasons and I got out of it what I wanted. It was definitely worth it but I am having to cope with the aftermath which is taking longer than I thought it would.
If I was to go back I'd still do one but I would do it differently. I'd certainly resist the temptation to get as many papers out and would focus more on taking bigger risks after I got the first 2 or 3 published.

As for you quitting, maybe you should make the decision to do so but don't tell anyone for 2 months.
Then see how you feel. Honestly if you hate the process, don't care about the certificate, don't want to use the qualification and it's affecting your health and your relationships to this degree then I'm struggling to see the value in continuing. Alternatively, you could list 3 good reasons to put yourself through this absolute hell. Not wanting to feel a failure is not a reason.

Just looked at photo of myself compared to one taken at the start of my PhD.
In 6 years, all colour in my hair has gone and I've lost about 4 stone.
I look like I've aged about 15 years.

The feeling of not being good enough and additionally being overqualified (even though I never wanted to be an employee or an academic anyway) didn't go away. It actually got worse and has remained so.

I also feel that stress level has not gone away. I seem to go from 0 to 100mph in seconds. I was always pretty spiky but I can nip at those around me for literally no real reason other than my stress tank being so full that any pressure tips me over the edge. To this day I won't tolerate time pressures and actively seek to avoid them.

I couldn't look at any of my PhD level work until about a couple of weeks ago when I started to open a couple of technical books related to it. So far it's OK but I can feel the pressure in the background.

The physical illness which hit me at the end of the process is still with me more than 2 years later as has the constant insomnia. If I sleep overnight I feel great. If I don't I will be physically ill until I get my cycle back again. I get about 2 good nights of sleep per month. That will give you an idea of how often I feel dreadful.

I am pretty highly motivated and I believe in getting on with things rather than wallowing in self pity and can still get things done but I'd be lying if I said that the PhD didn't change me and that I'd fully recovered. I should also say that this is the state I got into despite my PhD going very well with no major problems. If things had gone badly, I'm not sure I would have finished.

There is no standard timescale.
A friend of mine waited 7 months from submission.
My wait was either 6 or 7 weeks.
It took my own uni about 3 to 4 weeks to post my thesis to the external.
This phase was the worst part of my PhD.

If you are in counselling at the moment and have fragile mental health, I don't see any way that you can go back to the PhD until this is sorted. Once you are well, are you sure you want to risk re-opening those wounds?
If the PhD has damaged you to this extent, is it really worth going back and spending perhaps another year or more on it?

I had a year in Industry during my Masters degree. As with rewt, we got an NDA signed and that solved the problem.

People react differently to stimuli like those you have mentioned.
Some move on quickly and others can't seem to get past it.

Really, the only advice we can give is that you seek help from a trained professional.
We mean well on here but I'm pretty sure none of us are experts in mental health so we are limited in the advice we can give.

Quitting is not always an easy option or a cop out.
Not knowing when to quit can cause serious long term damage to a person.

In this specific case the OP will probably not quit but it's bad advice to use phrases like that in general.
It's one thing to find positives in a pile of negatives but it's quite another to force a positive attitude when there are no obvious positives in a situation. That is the road to bad mental health right there.