Anecdotal evidence can motivate scientific research.
Absolutely. And compilation and analysis of anecdotal evidence can lead to reasonable suggestions for modifying behavior even before there is a full understanding of the underlying mechanisms, trading off putative benefit of behavior change against cost of not doing so.
Besides, in this case, TFA quotes Boeing engineers demonstrating mechanisms by which the anecdotally described problems can be reproduced. In almost all serious accidents there are a number of factors, no single one of which would have caused the accident all by itself, although removing any single one of them might have been enough to prevent the accident.
Since there is no out of band channel from the end office to your phone (unless you have ISDN or VoIP), you probably can't prevent caller ID spoofing. As I understand it, caller ID is sent to the called phone as a burst of modem tones. It sees unlikely at this point in time that the installed base of telephone switches would ever be modified to do things differently.
"The four building blocks of the universe are fire, water, gravel and vinyl." -- Dave Barry