>Joe Public might come away with an over-simplified and over-confident knowledge about what science says, but I think that a clumsy knowledge of scientific facts is better than the impression that scientific knowledge is arcane and out of reach.

This seems like a false dilemma. Joe Public is as capable of reading a paper on sci-hub as anyone else. It would probably do everyone a bit of good if JP were more likely to do that when he's wondering what to do about the aphids in his garden, or read a patent relevant to his mechanics business, or assess the evidence around masks during a pandemic. And I think it's the idea that science needs to be dumbed down for a certain kind of person that keeps ordinary people from digging into the asterisks when things are relevant to what they're doing. Executive summaries are useful when something isn't very relevant, which is most of science for most people. But some science is relevant to everyone, and it would be good if we challenged the myth that one needs to belong to some kind of separate class in order to practice science. Science is for everyone. No one can know all of it, but everyone will come to a point where they'd benefit from knowing some of it.