It's got some obvious bias right now, but some articles are already better than Wikipedia - for example on the origin of Covid. I'm not really going to trust either one of them for the foreseeable future.
Public policies were made (or justified) based on some of this research. People used this "settled science" to make consequential decisions.
Stereotype threat for example was widely used to explain test score gaps as purely environmental, which contributed to the public seeing gaps as a moral emergency that needed to be fixed, leading to affirmative action policies.
Those things were not done by awful people though - they all thought they were serving the public good. We only judge it as awful now because of the results. Nearly of these ideas (Lysenkoism I think was always fringe) were embraced by the educated elites of the time.