Parachute effectiveness is a very reasonable thing to study, it’s pretty important to know how one parachute design performs compared to other designs and the obvious baseline is no parachute. A lot of things which appear to be self-evident have been extensively studied, generally you don’t want to just assume you know how something works.
Though throwing people out of a plane at altitude with no parachute probably isn’t the most ethical way to study parachute effectiveness.
Here’s a study on cadavers to determine whether people have the same number of nose hairs in each nostril. In academia there is no such thing as too trivial.
There’s plenty of studies on parachutes for spacecraft (eg, here’s one on aerodynamics of parachutes for mars landing) so if you follow the references somewhere down the line you’ll probably find studies on general parachute effectiveness.