Philosophy is a slippery slope the same way that improvising in music is. It's value is not in the results but in the process.
There are a few folks who do care about things like multiverses and quantum foundations, which certainly overlap with philosophy a lot more, but it's not really something most physicists do.
The example of string theory is actually proving my point. The resemble part is a philosophical observation not a scientific one. It's that ability to see new context ask different questions that's at the core of philosophy.
The point I am trying to make is that in the very act of conducting science is a philosophical pursuit. The scientific model is just another way of asking philosophical questions. And so you can't decouple them from each other. They are just different perspectives on the same phenomena. Keep in mind that for a long time QM had no application, no value it was seen as a curiosity. Yet it lived on long enough through the philosophical implications that it seemed to present.
Without a philosophical framework there is no meaning to the results of our experiments. They are just anecdotal isolated tests. Thats what Popper and later Kuhn was trying to deal with.
It was still kind of true in the social sciences like psychology and sociology in the last century, but they've become more 'real', more rigorous and less influenced by philosophers, the questions in those fields today are now asked by people who wouldn't identify themselves as philosophers but as scientists.
I would say that change has really crystallized in the last 20 years, when I was in uni psychology and sociology were still considered a bit of a joke, kind of not real science and the philosophy courses I did about them still tried to pretend to be relevant in the discussion. Now I think we're starting to see the rigor really kick in, which is demonstrated in the recent reproducibility saga.