> These simplified “one researcher caused an entire field to go astray for decades” explanations are much too pat for me to have any confidence in them.

Anyone who believes that an entire field and decades of researched pivoted entirely around one researcher falsifying data is oversimplifying. The situation was not good, but it’s silly to act like it all came down to this one person and that there wasn’t anything else the industry was using as their basis for allocating research bets.