20 Years Later
In computer science, researchers who had spent decades working on feature engineering for images got completely blown out of the water by deep learning.  All those decades of papers would never get another cite.  Everyone moved on.String theory doesn't actually do anything though, so there's no way to say it's better or worse than anything else.  It's like someone saying they're working on solving the halting problem or something and eventually they'll get there and they've been working on it for 20 years without any code that actually works.  At some point, you just have to give up and do something else.  They keep getting grants to work on this stuff though for some reason.  Someone needs to interview the people who are giving out string theory grants and ask them why the heck they are still giving these people money.