Science has often worked like that. As an example consider Galileo's discovery of the phases of Venus. It immediately destroyed the Ptolemaic model of the solar system. Even supporters of that system overwhelmingly immediately abandoned it.

Many substituted the hybrid model where everything but Earth and the moon went around the sun, and the sun and moon went around the Earth.

But that was reaching, and they must have known it.

There are plenty of cases where things have moved much faster than that - e.g. the adoption of QM and relativity, dark energy becoming a respectable hypothesis, plate tectonics, dinosaur extinction via impact... In each of these cases, either new evidence or a new explanation for previously-puzzling evidence was key.

It took 50 years for plate tectonics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics#History_of_the...

Are you not conflating continental drift with plate tectonics? The former was, for several decades, not widely accepted on account of the lack of a plausible mechanism. The latter is not the theory that the continents drift, but it provided the missing mechanism for how they do. Acceptance of both was swift once the distinctive paleomagnetic patterning of the oceanic crust was discovered. This scientific revolution was data-driven.