The scientific method was just a small concession in a long campaign of anti-intellectualism.

It seems like a huge victory for the intellectuals, but an actual victory for the intellectuals would have been not needing to "invent" the scientific method. It's just an overly-complex description of critical thinking, which you can use to embarrass people who are refusing to do critical thinking. Being outnumbered by those people, but convincing them to pretend to understand you to save themselves embarrassment, might have felt good for some smart people at the time, but their descendants are dying in a climate apocalypse now so it wasn't really a victory.