In defense of distrusting conventional academia, I currently work in conventional academia, and it has plenty of genuine problems above and beyond the mere fact that someone on the internet might have some hurt feelings about not fitting in at graduate school (or some secret long-held resentment about taking a lucrative industry job instead of martyring themselves to the idol of Intellect by... going to grad-school).

I still trust a replicated scientific study more than most other things, but I don't necessarily trust academia anymore to have done the right studies in the first place, and I have to remind myself that studies can only allocate belief-mass between currently salient hypotheses.