The general public wants something simple and useful.
The writers want recognition.
I learnt that when I wrote my own thesis. I tried to be simple and useful but I discovered something else when thinking about the subject: I wanted to make sure that my thesis gets good grades.
Now I’m currently doing research on a niche statistics topic and I would be lost without papers.
How does one figure out “this is what we currently understand about x” without research papers and plundering scihub?
So there are very few results you can expand upon. Lexical priming turned out to be reproducible and usable as a tool, the Stroop effect too. But those are exceptions. However, they don't explain the underlying mechanism. E.g., the Stroop effect is 90 years old, and there's no explanation of how it works. So if you read text books that explain you the state of the art of around 1980, you're practically up to date as far as real knowledge is concerned. The rest is infighting and publishing for its own sake.
And psycho-linguistics at least has some experimental standards, because it is a fairly limited topic and it is suited to lab settings. Other fields don't even have that. Social psychology is a joke. Articles are based on questionnaires and introspection.
That's why articles in those fields are not well read. They get read by a small audience, mostly people in the same school of thought, and mostly to add to the citation section. But not for knowledge.