"""How about you wait, and we talk again in 10 billion years."""
this is not so much a joke as a thinly disguised a deeply held conviction. There's no need for a secret cabal to explain why someone who clearly thinks the job should not even be done has trouble finding further employment in an extremely harsh job market.
She's obvious pissed off, and that should be taken into account when evaluating her assertions. Woit is way more pissed off, and probably the better mathematician. Smolin seems like, sad and resigned more than angry, but he also got a great gig wither Perimeter (which he might still hold?), which has to soften the blow.
Frankly my layman's knowledge of all this is badly dated, because after decades of avid interest going back to childhood I got so dispirited about it I've kind of stopped paying attention outside of a few bright spots (Deutsch/Marletto have my rapt attention).
So I don't doubt you that lots of people reject Stringworld now maybe even to the point of that being a fairly mainstream view, but 10 or 20 years ago that was a CLM at best and usually tenure-track suicide, and there's a whole generation of people who did in fact operate under the dictates of something that could, with a little poetic license, be called a "cabal". Dismantling the scientific method to admit the Landscape was, at least to an avid outsider, dogma not long ago.
I'm enheartened to hear that people are starting to try new stuff again, but it's not difficult for me to have sympathy for people who just kinda gave up.
Honestly I think the biggest problem is that you have the timeline wrong, string theory reached its zenith in the 90's, but already by 2002 Woit could give it a good public kicking and mostly get praise for it (if you trust his own account here: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/arxiv-trackbacks.html I find it deeply funny that of the two of the people he reports as being angry with his beat down, one is the infamous Lubos Motl! ).
As an aside, from the tone with which Woit recounts how people wrote possibly mean things about him in the comments of a blog, I suspect he might simply not be a very nice person to interact with which explains why he might have had trouble in his career.
For example, when reporting that he complained to the arxiv admins, he's careful to note he was polite, which I think sounds like someone who unprompted confirms they were wearing pants to an interview...
It seems to be a product of not realizing (or wanting to realize) how old I am! I just checked and Witten won his Fields in 1990, I would have sworn it was like 5-8 years later than that, to pick one key milestone. Getting old is an experience!
These people have (for better or worse) burnt the ships with the people of their generation who write grants and sit on tenure committees.
Hossenfelder’s pivot to “wildly over-credentialed pop-sci YouTuber” is interesting. My gut flinch reaction is like, “you’re better than this”, but… I have not walked a mile in her shoes, and if this is an end-run around a corrupt job market for particle/high-energy people who won’t won’t get on board with The Landscape? Maybe more power to her.
I give that context so that people will know (my opinion on) the backstory for why she’s in an adversarial relationship with The Academy.
The “will never know” phrasing might be unfortunate. But the epistemological principle goes back to Hawking at least: “asking what happened before the Big Bang or where it came from is like asking what is north of the North Pole”.
It’s a fun thing to theorize about, but the Big Bang is almost definitionally “the bound on observable causality”. It’s not a statement about what we won’t ever know, it’s a statement about what’s knowable.