Scientific consensus has value, but science also requires that people be open to having their pet theories be validated through replication.
Consensus is an extremely time-consuming thing to build, and it's extremely important to be aware of when there exists a consensus, where there isn't one, and what the consensus is.
It isn't an appeal to authority fallacy, it's a form of deferral to expertise, and it's one of the most important heuristics we have.
In my alma matter field the question was whether her2 receptor recycles (has implication of all breast cancer antibody therapies that target her2) and a paper from a Genentech lab had ONE FIGURE (where different data points from different experiments) as proof. An entire sub field including projects in my own lab were spawned assuming this.
Whenever I point out this flaw in lab meetings I’d be shut down by my professors as “they know the authors they trust them”.
To say that everyone "believes in" a model could mean that everyone accepts it as plausible (and thus worthy of further exploration), or it could mean that everyone is justifiably certain that it maps properly to a real phenomenon.
I never say that something is "consensus" in the first case: IMO, the term should be reserved for the latter case, or appropriately qualified.
In any case, the situation you describe appears to lack meaningful triangulation. [1]
The experience of saying how you would do it better and getting it torn to shreds really brings you back down to earth.
What's really interesting to me is that such vast sums can be spent, a number of people apparently did not like the Aβ*56 hypothesis and had substantial reason to oppose it or try to find holes in it with substantial rewards for doing so, yet the ones to find problems were some dudes (without any funding at all) just poking around.