We can bikeshed what makes something a "science" till the cows come home but the philosophy of science and epistemology were not settled with Bacon and Popper - the end goal has always understanding in the broadest sense. Those studies have value as long as they help someone make sense of and adapt to the social systems they're in. It does mean though that those studies should be approached with extreme caution (see the decades wasted on string theory) and anyone basing their research off past results needs to carefully validate their assumptions.
[1] I think in this case "predictive" as a scientific term of art is too restricting. Social sciences often deal with very personal interactions that appear nondeterministic at the scale of a society but are relatively predictable when applied to a stereotypical office or school setting.
At the very least, it seems to me like the person I originally responded to would also disagree with judging social sciences for its "utility" - the article they linked specifically contrasted it with the natural sciences that "solve problems".
Closest analogy off the top of my head is psychiatric drugs: their efficacy is generally bottom of the barrel except for some group with factor X (each drug has their own unique factor X). For the vast majority of these drugs, we have no method of screening for whether a person has factor X - we don't even know what it is most of the time - so doctors have to go through a process of trial and error with patients until they find the right drug or combination. Once they do, it's like a night and day difference for the patient, yet if we applied the same standard of evidence for psychiatric drugs that we do for blood pressure pills, we'd never make any progress. A lot of the drugs look like they don't work in phase III and we have no way to predict which drug which help which patient but the patients figure it out with their doctors because they have actionable data, even if it isn't predictive in general.
