Widespread misperception of phenomena only "matters", socially speaking, when the misperception has real-world consequences.
For any number of things, perception=reality, because "reality" is a contingent construct.
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Thinking about this as I read a section on how machine learning has "replaced" experts in a number of fields where the purported gains of machine learning are 100% fraudulent.
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It doesn't really matter if it has or not, in the context of the social status of expertise in said fields - it will have the exact same social impact as if it did.
Perhaps more.
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People rarely protect anything as vehemently as they do self-serving lies.
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Of course, it will matter in the sense that any field which starts using machine learning instead of human experts is likely to suffer an abject drop in performance, if said experts are *real* and not themselves part of a fraudulent field.
But such things are difficult to track.