Yes, I understand what you mean. We have the same problem in my professional field (I don't want to be too specific, because it might make it easy to identify me). There's a big push for "data-driven decision making", but data alone gives a false sense of confidence that you're taking a factual/neutral approach, when it's really just a very-low-resolution, pixelated snapshot of a complex, messy reality.

These days, there's a big push to combine quantitative and qualitative data (including feedback from the people we're supposed to be serving and the experience of practitioners) to get a better-rounded picture of what's happening and where we can fit in. The data still matters a lot — especially for things like drug trials — but it's just the start of the journey, not the end.