Ideas and breakthroughs in physics don't usually just appear out of vacuum. More often, they occur through a series of mathematical analogies, heuristics, and trial and error. String theory, for example, was motivated by the fact that the equations that govern gluons resemble equations of a vibrating string.

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.

Sure. There are also plenty of philosophers who don't philosophize. Instead they know everything about other philosophers.

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.