The lesson isn't that Millikan screwed up, everyone can screw up at some point. The lesson is that folks had a chance to show Millikan was wrong simply by rerunning his experiment and coming up with the correct result. But they didn't. They didn't have the integrity to challenge Millikan's result. They turned every dial they could to fudge the numbers enough to end up with a result near Millikan's.
How would such dynamics pan out for experiments that aren't amenable to the sort of polite gradual adjustment as Millikan's was?
The real lesson is that this sort of thing (fudging numbers, lack of scientific integrity) is quite prevalent but most of the time goes unnoticed because there isn't something as dramatic as with the Millikan experiment to show it plainly.
How would such dynamics pan out for experiments that aren't amenable to the sort of polite gradual adjustment as Millikan's was?
The real lesson is that this sort of thing (fudging numbers, lack of scientific integrity) is quite prevalent but most of the time goes unnoticed because there isn't something as dramatic as with the Millikan experiment to show it plainly.