Yang's point wasn't that there should be no large scale projects, just that they shouldn't do accelerators.

"Yang argues that high-energy physicists should eschew big accelerator projects for now and start blazing trails in new experimental and theoretical approaches."

Things like the IceCube project (https://icecube.wisc.edu/) come to mind as better (and cheaper) projects to pursue. They approach the particle physics questions from a different experimental viewpoint.