I see a lot of pointless documentaries these days. Documentaries that would have never been made a decade ago because there is no story or point to them just a collection of footage. They have a subject, but nothing happens of interest or relevance, but they just throw all the footage together and call it a documentary anyway.

If journalism was skipped, the product isn't a documentary. So perhaps TV is not making more documentaries than ever?

Viewers think it's a documentary, it walks and talks like a documentary.

I've encountered people that spread falsities as facts because they heard it on a podcast.

People have abused other people's trust for millennia, it's just now spread to a new medium.

Absolutely. But just because something is done in the style of a documentary doesn't make it a documentary. That was my only point. It seems to me that a lot of things being represented as "documentaries" are really opinion pieces.