How do you pick the set from where you are picking the "overwhelming majority"?
I would argue that most things we use daily now started out as anecdotes rather than science experiments. Most of the food we eat, etc. The buildings we live in, being in the nature, exercise, sleep, etc.
They were all anecdotally described before we were able to run proper science on them.
Moving the goalposts a bit there, there’s no way in which wood’s utility depends on random peoples observations they can point to its actual use in a structure. We’re just talking about medicine here because we can’t see people’s past condition.
So the set includes all forms of historically practiced medicine from anywhere in the globe. From Chinese medicine to Voodoo, people did all kinds of things to dry to get better. Our ancestors didn’t use electronics, plastics, synthetic fibers, aluminum, etc which is a large fraction of what people interact with in a daily basis.
Western medicine kept a tiny fraction native from wound care via Honey to willow bark, the stuff that worked was either copied or refined when active ingredients were isolated. But when the actual useful techniques are under 1%, there’s hardly a reason for you to individually investigate people’s random claims.
Consider all of homeopathy is useless, for you to say test each individual treatment would be just as silly as individually testing each different prayer in faith healing.
I would argue that most things we use daily now started out as anecdotes rather than science experiments. Most of the food we eat, etc. The buildings we live in, being in the nature, exercise, sleep, etc.
They were all anecdotally described before we were able to run proper science on them.