Richard Feynman has a good talk on this tendency to do "cargo cult science" [0]:

  The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool.  So you have to be very careful about that.  After you’ve not fooled yourself, it’s easy not to fool other scientists.  You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

The history of science is rife with examples where eventual well established theories had a hard time getting off the ground because mainstream thinking at the time actively refused to consider them (plate tectonics, inflation, etc). I remember reading quite a few example in Max Tegmark's book Our Mathematical Universe [1].

All this to say, both the current state of our attempts to reach the next frontier of human knowledge (string theory, say) and Sabine's criticisms follow age old traditions of back and forth in science. Both are needed, the former to make actual progress and the later to keep the bad ideas in check.

Having said that, I personally detest the particular populist-with-lack-of-nuance approach Sabine (and others like her) take. I like Sean Carroll's books [2] and his Mindscape podcast [3] for a more nuanced view. For instance, his recent podcast with Raphael Bousso [4] is such a nice overview of the current state of the art Physics. On string theory:

   String theory, I think, has given us from my perspective, as far as I can tell, the only consistent candidates for theories of quantum gravity that are in any sense complete. In particular, it has led to the discovery of the AdS/CFT correspondence. That is a lot of letters. But what it means is that there’s a certain class of universes, unfortunately, not including the one that we seem to be living in, but still a very rich set of space times worlds that you can imagine, for which we have a complete quantum theory of gravity. Or at least it could be wrong. We haven’t tested it experimentally. But it’s a very significant statement that you have a theory which is complete in itself, it’s not missing anything. You could put it on a computer and run it, you can calculate things with it. And so that I would say is, from the physics perspective, the number one thing that has come out of String theory, there’s a lot of beautiful mathematical results, and many other applications that the theory has had.

[0] https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/51/2/CargoCult.htm

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/19395553-our-mathematica...

[2] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/books-courses/

[3] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/

[4] https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2022/11/21/218-...