There's a tradition where behavior economists first come up with an esoteric model of rationality that would require people to do things that defeat their self

There's a tradition where behavior economists first come up with an esoteric model of rationality that would require people to do things that defeat their self interest, then perform experiments to see if subjects do them or not. This guarantees them publishable results: either you get "humans not rational!" or "rational behavior leads to bad result!" no matter what the subjects do. My experience is like yours: I've read a decent amount of economics stuff, and nothing that didn't have an axe to grind about the subject of rational actors itself ever proposes the kind of broken rationality models that the pop behavior economics stuff claims every economist believes.