I don't think my arguments are going to be very effective in the comment section of a web forum. (See Socrates discussing the written word with Phaedrus for the epistomological issues of discourse without active dialog.)
I also believe that the fundamental strength of empirical epistemology is that it liberates us to some degree from our expectations, instead saying "set up the method and do the legwork, and let the results tell you what is correct." I happen to like that methodology, for two reasons. First, empiricism allows a more open minded approach to misconceived problems. Second, if applied correctly, empiricism is the only consistently useful epistemology because it is acquired in the same practical manner as it is applied.
That said, I think academia has a very low bar in general for research that is politically well-oriented, but scientifically ill-constructed. I think the peer-review system is less of a check on BS than it should be, and that there is a lot of social pressure that prevents researchers from stepping out of certain boundaries. Nowhere is this more true than in the social sciences, where there is more room to fudge facts and findings, as well as to infer and opine. So in a sense I totally agree that the target audience is always key to accepting knowledge in academia.
However, knowledge and truth are not identical sets, and something can be proven true without being accepted into the corpus of knowledge. Conversely, some of the BS that gets bandied about as "knowledge" in academic circles is just untrue gibberish that helps people go to conferences or gain acceptance in a weird elitist circle of ivory tower pinheads.
And then you get stuff like a textbook company publishing research saying "Nah bro textbooks are way better. Buy more of them bro."
Empiricism as applied to theories of gravity is one thing. Empiricism through statistical inference is entirely different.
I can actually reproduce the expected results of the theories of gravity by measurements related to projectiles and celestial bodies. In this way I can directly experience their truths.
However, I cannot reproduce the results of the majority of psychologic, economic, and sociologic experiments for a number of reasons, and for the sake of brevity I'll just refer any readers to a couple of Wikipedia articles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misunderstandings_of_p-values
Beyond these issues with methodology are the dissemination to and interpretation by the general public who will not have access to the studies themselves and will always and only be presented with summaries unless they happen to know someone with access to a digital or analog university library. This makes discussions about methodology moot as most people will not be able to examine the nature of the experiment.
Considering the general public's access to academic knowledge is restricted while their access to commercially produced knowledge is promoted and subsidized by advertising, we should be able to see the epistemic crisis in our contemporary age of information.