I think we should separate "empiricism here is currently difficult" to "absolutely impossible"
Some fields of social science are undergoing internal turmoil (eg. Macroeconomics and some subfields of psychology). This is a good sign; old models are being discarded as new evidence and better methods pop up. In fact, I'm more concerned about sociology, where there wasn't a replication crisis.
Facts are being improved upon when you see crisis in replication. That's a sign of a healthy field of study.
As an econometrics/labor econ grad student, I can tell you I (and most of macro) could answer many questions definitively if we could do things we absolutely should not (eg. Run RCTs on real cities on things like the minimum wage). In microeconomics, we've resorted mainly to look for the effect of exogenous shocks on systems we care about (eg. The Muriel boatlift made a few studies on local unemployment/immigration due to the exogenous shocks nature of the event)