For your first question, consensus introduces a truth discerning process onto the indiscriminate votes of the population (democracy). Indiscriminate votes are better than blind trust in a single source, but the scientific process totally precludes indiscriminate votes from the pursuit of truth. There's a logically consistent process to arrive at a logical truth; you perform it.
Whether the pursuit is, in truth, important... is the big question. Many believe that faith is enough, even to behave on provably unprovable things.
To say that pursuit of truth is worthwhile is itself an article of faith. But if we assert that it is, we can collectively discuss how that truth seeking ought to occur.
I think there's a difference between science and democracy. Democracy makes no reference to anything other than the collected votes of a population. Science isn't driven by consensus, it's driven by a certain pragmatism that accepts the material world as an arbiter. Your hypothesis either holds up it doesn't, regardless of which way the consensus goes.
It seems you were already getting at that point, but I think that would tell us that science and democracy are not on the same spectrum of truth-seeking.
The spectrum is based on trust.
Science is trust in the scientific method plus your ability to carry it out alone. Consensus is trust in some method of discerning truth from a collection of votes. Democracy is accepting truth from a collection of votes alone. Trust is believing a truth from a single vote alone
The pursuit of truth must live on that spectrum somewhere. But it's moot, if the "meta-truth" is something outside that spectrum, in which case, the pursuit is pointless 😏
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