especially when science is so blatantly for sale AND in the middle of a reproducibility crisis like never before seen in history.

That's the industry's problem. A person doing their own data collecting has all the tools necessary to create a perfectly valid collection of data without that ever coming into play, other than if they use other sources without considering how those might have been changed by it.

If you aren't going to examine the data and the methodology yourself, then it's not only worth not assuming any given statistic is correct, but I would argue it's actually worthwhile to assume it false.

That's what I have been saying from the start, except you must also apply it to your own collecting. And asking random people you know has easy holes you can poke in it with barely any knowledge of how stats work to begin with.