Disclaimer: I may not be the right person to be joining this discussion, as a never-religious atheist, but I think your point 1 is understating the problem. Religion (and I’m mostly thinking of Christianity here, but I think the same applies to Islam and Judaism) doesn’t just make ”straightforwardly false” claims. The claim “ivermectin is a wonder drug that cures 100% of Covid” is straightforwardly false and potentially harmful but doesn’t generate the same reaction. Religion demands thought patterns which systematically undermine your ability to tell true from false.
Examples:
You must have faith. Faith is praiseworthy, doubting is wrong / sinful. Requiring evidence for your beliefs is therefore wrong.
Questioning what you are taught by (religious) authority figures is sinful.
If the (holy) text doesn’t make sense or is outright self-contradictory, you should rationalise the problems and teach yourself to ignore any evidence that the text is not perfect.
Training yourself to apply these degraded thought-patterns undermines your entire epistemics and is consequently very difficult to self-correct. That is far more harmful than embracing any individual object-level false belief.
ETA: I should have said this before diving into an object-level response. Congratulations on writing an interesting first post with an important question on a neglected topic.
I’ve been asking myself the same question about bureaucracies, and the depressing conclusion I came up with is that bureaucracies are often so lacking incentives that their actions are either based on inertia or simply unpredictable. I’m working from a UK perspective but I think it generalises. In a typical civil service job, once hired, you get your salary. You don’t get performance pay or any particular incentive to outperform.[1] You also don’t get fired for anything less than the most egregious misconduct. (I think the US has strong enough public sector unions that the typical civil servant also can’t be fired, despite your different employment laws.) So basically the individual has no incentive to do anything.
As far as I can see, the default state is to continue half-assing your job indefinitely, putting in the minimum effort to stay employed, possibly plus some moral-maze stuff doing office politics if you want promotion. (I’m assuming promotion is not based on accomplishment of object-level metrics.) The moral maze stuff probably accounts for tendencies toward blame minimisation.
Some individuals may care altruistically about doing the bureaucracy’s mission better, eg getting medicines approved faster, but unless they are the boss of the whole organisation, they need to persuade other people to cooperate in order to achieve that. And most of the other people will be enjoying their comfortable low-effort existence and will just get annoyed at that weirdo who’s trying to make them do extra work in order to achieve a change that doesn’t benefit them. So the end result is strong inertia where the bureaucracy keeps doing whatever it was doing already.
You get occasional and unpredictable exceptions to this dynamic if 1) there’s some exceptional cause that produces a ‘war effort’ mentality such that lots of people will voluntarily put in effort to achieve the same goal eg fast approval of Covid vaccine or 2) someone very senior wants to accomplish real change and puts in effort toward that. And in the case of 2) it probably still needs to be change that can be accomplished by something like writing new rules, because if the change requires large numbers of employees to actually change the way they work, they may successfully resist it. (See every large government IT project ever.)
I don’t like my conclusions. And I haven’t ever worked in an actual government bureaucracy, although I have been part of corporate ones, so this is very much a case of the outsider looking in. I hope that my speculation is wrong. But this is the best model I have of how government bureaucracies work.
[1] If there were such incentives you could at least start talking about Goodharting but I don’t think there are.