Can the average person discover reliable facts?

TL;DR: As a lay person (non-scientist/academic), how do I find if a topic has been studied? Given knowledge of the existence of a study, how do I find that study? Given a study, how can I easily evaluate the general reliability of it?

In this age of easy-to-distribute (mis|dis|)information I search for lots of info on the web. I have to filter through the fluff pieces and hopefully find out a study exists. Fluff news pieces appear to be the only real gateway to actual studies outside of academia, which can't be good incentives for study authors. Then I must get access to the study itself, which seems to usually involve paying a surprising amount of money to various paygates that themselves have varying veneers of trustworthiness.

If I actually manage to get a study, I don't know how to establish if it has been: peer-reviewed, published in a respected journal, replicated, and/or if it has good RELEVANT p-values. I can look for obvious logical errors/omissions, but this gives more strength to the communication skill of the author(s) than in the validity of the research.

An example topic I struggled to find studies for was "people find in-person communication to be more effective than text, but (1) how much of that is comfort/familiarity and (2) how much is a false FEELING vs FACTUALLY effective?"

An example study that I don't know how to evaluate: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3092984/

Other topics/studies are welcome, these are just to pre-answer any "can you give an example" responses.

I don't mind proxying reliability evaluation to a third party if they are considered reliable themselves, but I've not found any general answers for that (and knowing which evaluators in a niche are reliable becomes a chicken/egg problem).

Is it realistically possible for us to have confidence in "facts" outside our areas of expertise without an intense level of effort?