Yep. Sadly, these sorts of critiques are often just a thinly-veiled attempt to reject any sort of scientific approach to economics, and instead just replace it foundationally with something that's more amenable to the author's ideological priors.

If you come up with a new working paradigm to predict macroeconomic variables, and you manage to use it to great practical success, the discipline is not going to freeze you out of publishing or whatever. You can precipitate a scientific revolution.

Of course, the vast majority of critics aren't even pretending they can do this. Instead they'll attack the status quo without having anything better to offer, as if showing the flaws of a theory provide rhetorical justification for believing whatever you want. It's like a secular version of the "god in the gaps" argument.