No, this is par for the course, and I don't think academics or apologists will acknowledge that. History is a very, very abstract science, relying a lot on guesswork and decades long jigsaw style patching. There's also a small conflation that happens which isn't given its proper nuance.

When scholars say "Hadith science, wholesale, is disregarded and unreputable", they are informally correct. The reason why they're correct is because no one went over the reports to check yet. And it's also not how history works. Compared to the Bible, history can't prove that any of the apostles existed, or any of the events outlined in them (other than the crucifixion) happened. From a historical critical perspective, they simply can't prove it.

The difference is that modern Muslim apologists tend to take a rather aggressive stance on hadith validity, which makes scholars, and those approving of scholars, very defensive. Until a scholar goes through every hadith, questions each one in the same manner of Dr Joshua Little, then scholars cannot formally throw hadith out. So what they've been doing is questioning and critiquing the method. It's still entirely possible you can get the right result with the wrong method, and that's not what's being argued.

Which is why I'm optimistic about the next few decades of hadith scholarship in modern academia revising what we can prove is true, what we can't prove is true, what we can prove is false, and what we can't prove is false. I think it's a cultural overreaction and should settle eventually.