It's a shame we cast their role in the history of science in such a negative light, as if science was a game to be won or lost instead of a collective process where a clear path forward only appears in hindsight (only to be proven wrong again sometime later) .
Oh yeah, and that anecdote you told about tectonic plates screams survivorship bias; that's the problem with anecdotes.
Very good point. For every tectonic plates theory or heliocentric system or H. pylori causing ulcers there are thousands of claims that are plain wrong. Statistically speaking, knowledgeable critics acting in good faith (eg, not having strong conflict of interests) are correct with the overwhelming probability.
You get this all the time with perpetual motion machines. The near certainty of the claim being false leads to confident dismissals that go 'blah, blah, laws of physics, blah blah thermodynamics, therefore can't happen'
The real question to be asking about a claim of a perpetual motion machine is 'Where does the new energy come into being?'.
Citing laws of physics won't help you because any claim to have made a perpetual motion machine is implicitly claiming to be a proof by counterexample that one of those laws is wrong.
Citing the laws of physics in this case is the shorthand way to point the overwhelming number of proofs by example that the laws are correct.
If your law is all liquids flow off a ducks back. Water off a ducks back does not prove it. Acid off a ducks back disproves it. https://i.imgflip.com/7waajp.png
I don't think it is a matter of a shorthand. I think it is because humans have a tendency to express a strong opinion when they intend to express that a weaker opinion is strongly held. Citing laws of physics does not say "Your perpetual motion machine won't work" but rather "I am confident that your perpetual motion machine will be shown to not work".
A single device, made in some garage, that appears to disprove it is simply not rigorous enough to prove anything and isn’t worth third party investigation until the creator has shown they’ve ruled out possible explanations.
Galileo's initial results could not predict many things that the old geo-centric models could predict for centuries.
This is almost inevitable with a groundbreaking new framework, but the skeptics aren't wrong to point it out, it's up to the supporters to show it can do what old model can do and more, which Galileo was never quite able to show in his lifetime, if I recall correctly.
Again, it's easy to look back and talk about how these "irrelevant nitpicks" of tectonic plates and helio-centrism were "wrong" or "irrelevant", but that's just not how science works, you don't get to skip over the details when you present a theory that undermines everything we know, that's just crackpot behavior.