“Mr. President, we don’t know a damn thing about the surface of the moon, and we’re making the wildest guesses about how we’re going to land on the moon. And we could get a terrible disaster from putting something down on the surface of the moon that’s very different than we think it is”
Those were the good old days when scientists asked hard questions.
Then the “fake it until you make it” gang took over....
That wasn't a hard question, it was one expression of the foolish idea that anything landing on the Moon would sink into the dust.
The lunar surface has been exposed to billions of years of impacts, including micrometeor impacts, which in the absence of an atmosphere, has produced a hard packed surface.
The Ranger probes sent back loads of pictures, and the later Surveyor probes made five soft landings (two others lost contact with Earth, and may or may not have made automated touchdowns) as unmanned proof of concept.