It occurred to me while reading Scott's blog article that a very interesting idea for a SciFi novel would be to explore a future society where are current religions are replaced with these QM religions.
a) are almost universally honest about the empirical difficulties in their field,
b) are reasonably exploring the possible theoretical options to hopefully create testable predictions for a future experiment/telescope (science is hard)
c) have made major advances in mathematics, with important (and testable) applications outside of string theory
I feel like you’re projecting the attitude of one sometimes unscrupulous scientist (Brian Greene) onto the entire field. Although laypeople’s fascination with string theory has died down it is still a vital and vibrant field.