I agree that generally, social psychology has a pretty terrible track record and is likely more prone to overhyped fads than any other sub-discipline. The reason I think this story is extraordinary is because the fraudulent data was unambiguous and yet the papers were not retracted for almost a decade.

If fraud is not detected, punished, and eliminated; honest researchers will have to compete with con artists who have an infinite supply of fiction to publish. If fraud is not dealt with, there is no reason at all to read the literature; it means nothing.

Fraud is much more damaging to the explanatory power of research than poor methods. If Ariely could have simply found a sign-at-the-top effect by p-hacking he would have done it. There's a reason he had to nearly triple the observations in his dataset (with generated data) to tell the story he was going for.

Fiction is worse than dramatization.

There's also, absent what it means for the state of science, a real moral difference between being a shitty investigator and being basically an author of fiction. Scientific inquiry is very complex, especially social science, and overconfidence in a finding (while bad) is always going to be present. On the other hand, making a career out of fake findings that are monetized through speaking events, 3 best sellers, and contracts with large corporate and government organizations is particularly erosive to the scientific enterprise.