I think a lot of studies are actually illegitimate. I think scientists all admit this, which is why peer-review, disclosing conflicts of interest, sharing your data, reporting all your measures BEFORE you collect data, not lying with statistics, etc are all being asked for (and often not done). This is why scientists often weight for meta-studies and replication before trusting any finding.

Laymen also correctly have an intuition that the people doing these studies aren't entirely trustworthy. What they don't have is a clear picture of how much work goes into these studies, who's doing it, what their motivations are, etc.

In my opinion studies when they can, should record videos of all data and make it publicly available online. Watching somebody do 1,000 hours of research is more proof-of-work to lay-people than some semi-coherent summary-for-a-layperson article.