Since the amount of dissent will be naturally much lower among bearers of formal titles, shifting the focus from actual scientific merit to formal titles serves to minimize the amount of dissenting voices who are taken into account.
One of the central features of State Pseudoscience.
A form of appeal to authority that regards officially recognized titles/credentials to be infallible indicators of someone's competence, and treats "expert" as synonim of: "bearer of an officially recognized title".
The main purpose of this fallacy is to arbitrarily dismiss the voices of all those who, despite having a deep and provable knowledge in their fields, hold no credentials either by accident or by choice, and are therefore much less prone to conformism, corruption or coercion, such as self-taught indipendent researchers, or those who went through a regular academic career, but either are unemployed or chose a different job for personal reasons.
It is also a very useful tool of consensus manufacturing, since it tacitally conflates "scientific community" with "academic establishment": by restricting the set of "acceptable" science to those who pass through officially sanctioned institutions and academia, it ensures that the vast majority of voices inside it will agree with the official stance, while giving the illusion that disagreement comes mostly from uneducated laymen.
Since the amount of dissent will be naturally much lower among bearers of formal titles, shifting the focus from actual scientific merit to formal titles serves to minimize the amount of dissenting voices who are taken into account.