>This is a label applied from outside
I don't think this is accurate. Most rationalists seem to self-describe as rationalists, and talk about rationalism as a "thing".
There is some dogma, sort of, in the form of The Sequences. (An extraordinarily goofy name that belies some of the mysticism-adjacent LARP that sought to treat the ideas as revolutionary. I suspect a 20 year old was behind it.) I say "sort of" dogma because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate and have generally abandoned them. But you still see some references to them and vague reverence of them.
> I suspect a 20 year old was behind it.
Yudkowsky wrote them from 2006-2009, so he would have been in his late 20s.
> because people are aware that the studies referenced in there turned out not to replicate
The Sequences are about pure reasoning, not about results from "studies". They are very much about how to analyze studies and about the fact that you should care whether they replicate.
In fact, I can't even recall any such "studies referenced".