There might still be some value in it. I think people will use tools like AdS/CFT correspondence for a while. And it is worth remembering that in terms of actual dollars, fundamental physics research is not that big of a spend. Like, part of the reason why these articles are important, is that the pie is so small to start with. So I don't worry too much about the string theory grant money, if anything I would not mind the absolute dollar amount going up if the relative fraction decreased with it.

The one thing that kind of irks me is this Kaku book “The God Equation.” I have only seen one equation that is so universally applicable that it could deserve that title, and even then I would be hesitant about that because it might give people the wrong impression. (It is the transport equation—it keeps appearing and appearing, a bunch of other equations are special cases of it, it is involved in one of the million-dollar Clay Mathematics prizes so there is clearly something hard/intractable about it, and it has a term which refers to creation and destruction. It says, a box flows downstream, the time rate of change of stuff in the box is equal to the flow J of stuff through the walls of the box plus the rate Φ of stuff being created/destroyed in the fluid. Or, ∂ρ/∂t + (v · ∇) ρ = - ∇ · J + Φ.)