Should I consider quitting my PhD, or moving to a lower-rank institute?
Why is your situation frustrating to you? Overall, reading between the lines, I see a discouragement at a growing awareness of your limitations versus what you believe about the expectations being put on you.
My foremost recommendation is this: You should have a discussion with your current advisor.
Your intent should be to determine whether the expectations that you are starting to believe about your lack of performance (no publications) and lack of independence (as per your advisor) are real or simply mis-perceptions. A concrete example is to ask your advisor: Should I really have published by now? A broader example is to ask your advisor what specific actions you can do to demonstrate that you are taking on a greater level of independence.
I imagine that, accepting that you must hold this discussion is not easy. The consequences of avoiding it can however be damaging, for example by causing continued stress worrying about what you think your advisor is thinking or worse, discovering that your advisor has essentially given up on you showing sincere interest in learning by pro-activity participating in the advisor-to-student experience. Advisors are not ignorant about the shortfalls of their advisees, nor are they necessarily ignorant of their responsibility to find ways to help when asked.
I would have one specific answer to the second, broader question about possible ways to show your independence. Step forward at the discussion with your advisor with your plan to prepare a PROPOSAL for your research to defend to a dissertation committee by a specific, hard-set deadline. A proposal is NOT a defense of work done. It is a defense of work to be done. It states why the work is important in context of current issues. It states your hypotheses or problems. It defines how and why you will go about doing the work needed to valid the hypotheses or solve the problems.
This type of approach is one that is common in some PhD institutes. Instead of asking for a qualifying exam on didactic courses to be granted permission to continue with a PhD, the department requires that students prepare and defend a dissertation proposal. They require this even before a student is to have submitted any publications. Indeed, in some cases, they set hard deadlines for this step, with the consequence that the student who does not do it is not allowed to continue further.
This action could be one way for you to start to show independence (something that your advisor has already said seems to be lacking). This approach is likely also to result in greater "public acknowledgement", even if only at a local (university) scale to start. Finally, this approach is likely to focus your attention better to prepare a publication on your research topic, indeed even help streamline the writing and acceptance process because you have done the background work for the introduction.
Taking this step will also help you to discover other issues that may be behind your frustration. For example, do you have appropriate levels of self-disciplin, skills, and tools to self-administer the timelines that are required to meet concrete milestones for your dissertation? If not, start spending more time to learn how to set concrete, realistic, and relevant milestones; start finding the tools that you need to do the administration on your own (e.g. calendars and task-manager apps and citation management apps); and start setting concrete milestones to complete at hard-set deadlines. I might suggest here that you "work the puzzle backwards". When you do want to graduate? When must you submit your dissertation? When must you give your oral presentation? When must you submit the final draft to your advisor? When must you stop doing research and start writing? And so on.
Continuing on the above, the remaining question to ask is whether you have a true, deep-seated motivation to even want carry out your current research. Does your motivation to do a PhD come simply from a nebulous desire to explore things further, or does it come specifically from a burning curiosity about or desire to fix a specific problem in a specific context of a specific research field. As you move from the being in the former situation (nebulous curiosity) to the latter situation (actions driven by the need to meet specific desires), your frustrations will change from "I don't even really know why I am here" to "This is not going to be as easy as I thought (but I will get it done)".