I have this view that the previous era of social structure was crafted through long trickles of actual know-how. This made the authority feels a bit stiff, but with the new open land of interwebs we're seeing how a "fluid" variant is mostly good to drown in.

ps: side note, I tried to leverage access to direct science (pubmed and similar) and I was quite surprised that the struggle you describe for mundane topics (no offense to your family) is similar in deep research. A gazillions of publications all talking about similar things but with various conclusions and a lot of maybes. I kinda saw that human society is that thin autofocus line between high education doubts and high ignorance. We live in the 'field tested' middle ground which is not truer, just more agreed upon.