That’s a complete misrepresentation of her position. Her point is that the efforts to characterize physics in terms of the elegance of purely mathematical approaches such as M-theory have lead to effectively unfalsifiable hypotheses that are not fruitful or used to justify increasingly complex “big science” proposals such as the massive Future Circular Collider, and such approached have resulted in a lack of advancement in the foundations of physics in the last few decades.
This isn’t a novel point of view; it is a common topic of discussion among theoretical high energy physicists, and is evident by the distribution of Nobel Prizes in Physics. Noodling about with infinitely tunable mathematical models requiring large numbers of unobservable or compactified dimensions doesn’t seem to be getting us any closer to unifying gravitation with the Standard Model, or understanding the fundamental basis of quantum mechanics, or resolving the “Crisis in Cosmology”, and in general has led to an approach in theoretical physics of ‘research’ by creating elaborate mathematical models with little or no connection to observable reality.
There is obviously plenty of basic research to do in many applied areas of condensed matter physics, superconductivity, quantum field theory, plasma and stellar physics, geophysics, biophysics, et cetera that are competing for the limited funding while big projects get billions, as well as observational astrophysics and cosmology that could potentially provide the answers we are seeking about fundamental particle physics without constructing multibillion dollar machines that use as much power as a small European country. Hossenfelder has some personal prejudice in this matter because of her career experiences (and in topics outside of her domain of particle physics she often gets out over her skis or fails to provide comprehensive views), but she’s also not wrong to question both the research focus and funding priorities on areas that are not really returning much in the way of fundamental physical insights or providing anything of utility even in the long view.
Stranger