While it’s about a book the question (IMO) is more appropriate for GD.
Re a GEB theme
Were his ideas of how human consciousness / cognition emerges accepted by the larger scientific community? The wiki does not really say.
What are you asking – do the the individual neurons of the brain coordinate to create a unified sense of a coherent mind comparable to the social organization displayed in a colony of ants? Or something else?
Since he indicates the main issue the books address is the origin and manifestation of consciousness and thought and that’s his analogy … yes. Is the ant colony - human mind example a scientifically valid analogy for the origin and manifestation of human cognition? Is it a useful and fruitful hypothesis?
He wrote a whole new book ~25 years later to simplify GEB down to its fundamental thesis: I am a Strange Loop.
A fantastic book and you should go read it. It’s GEB without all the clever but distracting stuff like Achilles and the Tortoise and predicate calculus. It is straightforward and packs more of a punch, without being as long winded and demanding.
Anyway, what you’ll find is that GEB, once you strip away all the playful anecdotes about Bach and interesting but dense explanations of Godel Incompleteness, is a philosophical treatise which theorizes that consciousness arises due to feedback. A particular kind of self-referential feedback Hofstatder calls a “Strange Loop”.
(Actually, not “arises from” but rather, that’s what consciousness is – I think GEB is more an attempt to define consciousness, rather than explain its origins as such.)
My contention is that GEB (and I am a Strange Loop), while motivated by science, and perhaps intended to shape scientists’ perspectives on consciousness going forward, is not a work of science at all. So I don’t think you can expect it to be “vindicated” in any way scientifically. It probably isn’t cited all that much, nor are there any successful experiments that were suggested by GEB.
About the most you could ask for is whether individual researchers in neuroscience and psychology find it has shaped their day-to-day views on consciousness.