She has a very empirical way of looking at things which is somewhat uncommon in theoretical physicists and appeals to interested outsiders who haven't been "inducted" into string theory or what have you. E.g. we might be able to do without dark energy, so why put so much emphasis on dark energy? We don't even see one superparticle at LHC, but grad students are still being pushed into stringy shit – why not cut our losses? Or on the flip side, here's a 6 sigma result!!! – why don't her peers seem to care?

The other side would be someone like Luboš Motl, who used to be quite popular too. His main point is that the mathematical completeness and coherence of string theory means it's the only game in town. Which, that might be a fair point, for all I know, but I'm a maths grad and I can only vaguely appreciate what he's going on about most of the time. It just needs a lot of study to get to grips with these theories well enough to judge them in the absence of confirmatory empirical evidence.