I fear you are right here, and that the problem is far more dire than much of academia realizes. I know enough highly intelligent people (some even with family / spouses in academia, surprisingly) that are otherwise very e.g. left / liberal / progressive and open, that are still basically saying academia needs to be gutted / burned down.

I've no idea what the actual stats are on faith in academia overall today, but I don't think it is looking good.

On the whole you should rarely read papers, you want to read a whole literature in an area. Academics embedded in the field can do this easily. Academics outside of an area know to do this, and to bounce things off an expert to make sure you have the context and aren't over-indexing on a flashy result. Everybody learns the painful lesson in grad school to not just read a paper and believe everything will work as it says.

Somehow the general public and policymakers got the idea that if a paper gets published in any non-fake journal, this is an official endorsement that it's 100% correct, everything in it can be read in isolation, and it's safe to use all claims in the paper to direct policy immediately.

I think academia is partially to blame for encouraging people to believe this rather than insisting on explaining the nuances of how to interpret published research. On the other hand, nobody wants to hear a message that things are nuanced, and they will have to do costly hard work to get at the truth.

I think a world where "you can take any published paper at face value...without going direct to primary sources and bouncing it off an expert in the space" would be great, but it never existed, and it's just fundamentally impossible.

Go read /r/LawyerTalk and enjoy the horror of the dawning realization that this is a lot of professionals. I think it's an issue that stems from getting too deep into the minutiae of the technical and cultural matters of one's field; you become a really good scientist, or lawyer, or SWE (by the standards of scientists and lawyers and SWEs), and end up coming to conclusions that everyone outside the bubble looks at and says, "That's absolutely asinine." Well, laymen just don't understand the details, you know? (Even though the whole point of these professions is to provide services to laymen, fix problems laymen come to them with, and guide laymen to make practical and logical decisions when a $500/hr appointment isn't called for.)

These people take themselves too seriously, and other people only take them seriously when there are material ramifications for not doing so. Otherwise, they're viewed as pompous busy-bodies and don't do themselves any favors by playing to the role.