I believe the latter, and the rule I mentioned also leads to that assumption. Otherwise, why read the studies at all? But that's not what people here do.
> missing major details on how the corrections/controls were made
I also make an assumption that some corrections/controls are so obvious within their field of study that they aren't worth documenting - that it's only "average joe" readers who assume they aren't being done.
It is, in a way, akin to asking why programmers didn't document how their JWT is secured.
BTW I've definitely gone into code reviews assuming the programmer lacks basic competence and been right. Other times, I've had to rollback other people's code (or stop a rollout) because an ostensibly genius programmer who made a change (and got a review from a starry-eyed junior) wasn't using their basic competence or testing their change at all.
The former is perfectly fine and encouraged. The latter is incredibly rude and derails discussions.
Relatedly, you took the rule incredibly literally just so you could critize a strawman...
> Unlike most people, I...
Yes, yes, you a very smart and everyone else, in particular me, is an idiot...
That said, if you are going to criticize something based on the idea "this result doesn't agree with my preconcieved notions so I'm going to say that their sample size was too small, the effect size was too small, or they made some sort of incorrect calculation, and conclude the paper can't be trusted", you owe it to yourself to read the paper carefully enough that you can make the determination they made a major error.
Unlike most people, I read the conclusion, then the methods section. For most papers I can't get enough from the methods section to conclude that I trust the authors to make their claim, because most methods sections are missing major details on how the corrections/controls were made.