Is that a lot? On what basis could we decide?(1) I am not saying it isn't, I am just saying it is a rather subjective call which sort of looks at the prior pace of discoveries and extrapolates a judgement.
(1) it took more than that from the first gravitational wave detector to an actual discovery
Einstein didn't predict gravitational waves as a standalone theory. Gravitational waves are a prediction of General Relativity. General Relativity was shown to be plausible based on data already at hand and data they could collect.
Gravity waves and lensing and frame dragging all confirm what we already suspected to be true. Which is good and bad news because they increase the corroborating evidence for an existing theory, and they take out huge chunks of opportunity for some other theory to explain the same phenomenon but introduce new loopholes or consequences that let us do new things like build Foundation power supplies (nuclear reactors the size of gumballs) or FTL travel or explain why galaxies move 'wrong'.
The Higgs Boson was found in 2012 by the LHC and was predicted by the standard model.
IANAPhysicist so correct me if I'm wrong but the last time we found something predicted [1] by the Standard Model was the Higgs Boson in 2012. Before that it was the Tau neutrino and the quark-gluon plasma in 2000, the top quark in 1995, and then (the discovery I think you're referring to) the W and Z bosons in 1983
[1] we mean experimental confirmation, right?
For instance special relativity explains gravitational lensing and predicted that frame dragging would also be discovered, but also explained other problems. The theories that make a physicist's day seem to tie the past to the present and the present to the future:
This happened, we don't know why. Here's a theory that explains those measurements. Here's a prediction we can test now/with a billion dollars that will corroborate my theory, and here are some new consequences of the theory that require <future tech> to be sure that this is 'true' instead of an accident of math. Like atomic clocks or giant particle accelerators.
edit: her complaint is that once funding sources realize that 'particle physicists shill ridiculous ideas for research grants', all of the money dries up and won't return for at least a generation or two. That's an existential threat to the field. That sounds like a legitimate complaint to me. Unfortunately she's also shining a spotlight on the thing she's worried about other people noticing.