Every search for BSM physics has returned a negative result. You can look at hundreds of arxiv papers by the two collaborations (CMS and ATLAS) that exclude large portions of parameters spaces (masses of hypothesized particles, strengths of interactions etc.) for these BSM models. If anything was found, it would be a breakthrough of enormous magnitude and would also provide justification for the next collider.
So, people have been truthful about the non-discovery of ideas that were extremely dominant in the high-energy community. This did not make them a laughing stock within the scientific community because every serious scientist understands how discovery works and the risk of working at the cutting-edge is that your ideas might be wrong. No one that I know of "made some shit up" in evidence at the LHC.
What do tenured faculty do? They either keep working on the stuff or pivot to other stuff. They are tenured - sure, some lose grant money but I know multiple physicists (very famous too) who have been working on other topics including non-physics problems.
The main criticism is whether we need these extremely expensive experiments in an era of global economic and political uncertainty. The usual argument from the physicists is that (a) we need these to advance the cutting edge of our knowledge (which might have unknown future benefits), and (b) these programs result in many side-benefits like large-scale production of superconducting magnets, thousands of highly trained scientists who contribute to other industries etc.
Whether this is a valid argument needs to be decided by the citizenry eventually. By the way, (via Peter Woit's blog) Michael Peskin recently gave a talk on the next-generation of colliders, the technologies involved and what theory questions have to be answered before making the case for funding - https://bapts.lbl.gov/Peskin.pdf