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Notes -
Historical fiction is still fiction. A novel which represents the historian's consensus would be entirely unreadable -- if our best estimate of the probability that A and B were having an affair is 0.5, you would have to write a superposition novel to be historically accurate.
I think the problem is more one of the readers (or viewers) treating a work as more accurate than it actually is. This is a problem both of works which use historical figures, but also can involve works which merely contain historical elements (like characters fighting with swords). For example, readers of ASOIAF (or viewers of GoT) might think they get an understanding of how medieval power worked. Or reading Ken Follet and thinking you understand medieval people, as you mentioned.
There is now a whole sub-genre of media reviews over at acoup in which the pedant objects to that. Some of it is nitpicking, like insisting that logistics in Westeros should make any sense. Others are a bit more serious, like the whole child soldier initiation through murder thing of Sparta which somehow gets skipped in popular accounts, thereby massively distorting the popular understanding of that society.
I guess to be safe from accusations of distorting history, science fiction is a much safer bet than fantasy (especially if it is fantasy with low magic density, where most armies rely on swords and spears). Frank Herbert is getting little heat for his depiction of space feudalism because nobody will read Dune and think they know how the Holy Roman Empire worked. Likewise, the Jedi are so far removed from European knights that nobody will mistake the one for the other, while GRRM's Sers are conceptionally close to the European knight.
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