That's a good way to put it. As my economics professors liked to point out, Black-Scholes was a self-fulfilling prophecy in that the success of the model was determined by the fact that everyone was using it (or some variation of it) to price derivatives.

If it had never been published would it still have been as accurate? Who knows.

When you dive deep it's easy to think of economics in terms of math and forget the fact that, unlike physics, it is a social field and there is no right and wrong aside from what people agree on.