"Trust the science" will work as long as science works, which even to this day is pretty nicely, this practice is given a bad name by the "Trust the science*" crowd, which activity is based on having a position then attempting to legitimize it by quoting the abstract of a paper they have never read, prioritizing pushing ideas above factual matters.

This in turn allows certain people in institutions to trade legitimacy for agenda pushing, creating the current crisis of institutional trust, which the legitimate "Trust the science" crowd suffers from.

Science itself is all about testable hypotheses and facts. If we can't rely on it, chances are we are doing something wrong and science itself is perfectly fine.