I weigh data with experience, and after enough "here is why X is bad" and "why X isn't bad after all", I heavily weigh my experience over corporate/journalistic poppycock.
Guess what? Not all data is good.
So anecdotes it is.
I hope you don't live life just believing what people tell you and not forming your own opinions. That would be a sad, robotic existence.
The thing about opinions is they are at best, shallow, and at worst incorrect.
I can backup that experience with my own. I can also say my life has even more dramatically improved since I stopped paying attention to the news cycle. But nobody is going to study that.