While I do not have an advanced degree in history, I was once in a very similar position to you only I also had unbalanced GRE scores pushing me even more towards the same direction. I didn't take the bait and now, with a doctorate in bioengineering and the benefit of hindsight, I'm very glad I didn't.

Across academia, one of the big transitions from undergraduate life to graduate school is one that no one really warns you about. As an undergrad, your success is the end goal of most everyone around you with power over you however, as a graduate student, you are almost always simply a means to some other end. This might sound dehumanizing but, so long as the context is right, it should give you power over your destiny that you may not have been ready for as an undergrad. Indeed, for the department, you will be a means of cheaply supporting professors who bring in cash or a means of cheaply instructing students who bring in cash. While for professors you could be a means of establishing pecking order in the department by supervising your teaching, a means of cheaply producing research with tools that are committed to sticking around for a while, a means of expanding their research community, or ideally all of the above; what you aren't is the customer like you were in undergrad, in a healthy context you are already the means of production.

The core goal of an academic, non-professional, graduate degree is to give you the skills to be a successful academic. More than it might be anything else, academia is a business model wherein cash is exchanged for products that have economic value. Whether those products are students taught, papers published, or books written, the whole of the enterprise is ultimately concerned with connecting people, organizations, and governments that have money with work that they want this money to support. To that end, any letter that you might get from an institution offering you a chance at a post-graduate academic degree but not enough funding for both tuition and a plausibly livable stipend like even some 'top' programs in history are inclined to do these days, is not an acceptance letter, it is an advertisement. However, the product that this advertisement would be attempting to sell you would not really be an academic degree documenting your acquisition of an economically viable skillset needed to join a functional business model. The product that it would be attempting to sell you would be the same delusion that led the department in question to take its failure to thrive and failure to fund its work out of the asses of its graduate students.

The romanticization of the field at this point is little more than a relic of earlier times when there was more demand for teaching from more students, and a time before that when we were at least more honest about a need to be independently wealthy.

I know that the overall market for history PhDs is abysmal, but is there truly no silver lining at all?

There are absolutely people who figure out a way to work the system and build their own silver lining, there are many of them here, but they don't stumble into them with a good GPA. What they do is focus on skillsets that can plausibly be economically viable, work to make that skillset viable, and find someone else to pay for the training. All of the obvious answers have been gobbled up by thousands of brilliant, desperate, and underemployed history PhDs who will shortly be joined by hundreds more established professors as small liberal arts institutions across the US continue to fall like dominoes. You could focus on the secondary education route that many of them failed to take seriously until it was too late, or if you speak another language fluently you could possibly move to another healthier academic market, or you could join another field that has functional mechanisms to value this kind of work. I joined a field of biology where historical work has immediate contemporary relevance, the value of which can be appreciated by funding bodies.

Your challenge will be to come up with a solution where those thousands of devastatingly smart and desperate people either can't compete with you or haven't thought to. Applying to a top-rated graduate school for a Ph.D. in history certainly can be part of a larger reasonable plan but, on its own, doing this is overwhelmingly likely "to destroy your future and eat your children". The advice in that excellent post by u/sunagainstgold about how to do this is excellent, but please take the advice seriously and do not follow it under almost any circumstance. UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES SHOULD YOU APPLY FOR A PH.D. POSITION EXPECTING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO MAKE A CAREER WHEN YOU ARE DONE OR PAY FOR IT YOURSELF.

And secondly, do top rated history PhD programs even make a difference for historians in the job market?

The short answer is generally yes, but only in a negative way. The job market is not as bad as it looks, its much much worse. Not only are there way more people with Humanities Ph.D.s than there are jobs for anglophone Humanities Ph.D.s, but those jobs were already rapidly disappearing before SARS-CoV-2

I'm an Asian history PhD candidate in a top-ten program in the U.S. (as defined by the last handful of U.S. News grad program rankings). In addition to the rigorous training in historical methodology, teaching, research, and socialization to the discipline we receive and teach our own students, in my case, I've also learned several languages and received prestigious fellowships which make the path toward careers in the federal govermnment, for instance—especially in the State Department—much more streamlined.

Ultimately, it depends on how you constitute "worth," but for me, I've gotten to spend several years teaching, researching, writing, travelling internationally, collaborating, and working with some incredible mentors, students, and interlocutors, all while drawing an admittedly meager pay (supplemented by fellowships and grants) but strangely fabulous health benefits (we're lucky enough to have a union).

Is the near decade I will have sunk into graduate education certain to pay off? Doubtful, but it's been one hell of a fun ride, and absolutely an intellectually and ethically stimulating route toward a far more expansive set of careers than one might at first think. Graduates from our program are tenured and contingent faculty alike at Ivy League institutions as well as private high schools (and at every shade of institution in between), they run research institutes and administer law school programs, a few work in city planning, some in academic and non-academic publishing, many work in federal and state government, as well as for NGOs, one makes artisinal chocolate, another premium handmade guitars, so....?