As somebody who interacts with physicists every day, I can say string theory has been considered unscientific for several decades. Lee Smolin, for example, the originator of Loop Quantum Gravity, wrote a scathing indictment of string theory called " The Trouble With Physics ," much like the string theory critique in "Not Even Wrong" by Peter Woit. Likewise, string theory was one of many targets in " Lost in Math, " by Sabine Hossenfelder.

The real nail in the coffin in the community's opinions of string theory came when the Large Hadron Collider failed to discover any new physics whatsoever, as so many GUT and SUSY promoters expected it would . Instead, it confirmed the existence of the Higgs Boson as the standard model predicted.

In fundamental physics, we have the standard model gauge group and Einstein's field equations . Everything else is so far fruitless. However, we know that our picture can't be complete, for two reasons. First, we don't have a quantum theory of gravity , so QM and General Relativity don't work together mathematically. And second, Quantum Mechanics is incomplete, and has no definition of a measurement nor physical explanation for wave function collapse .