One of string theory's many problems is that it gives you an absurdly large number of different theories. We assume some of these look like our universe but we don't really know.
This work is attempting to find versions of string theory which match the real-world physics we observe, which could lead to cool stuff (but probably won't).
For example let's say there is exactly one version of string theory which has protons in it, then suddenly instead of looking at this vast sea of different theories with no understanding of what we're doing, suddenly we're looking at this one model that happens to have the proton and trying to understand that.
Edit: on the other hand if people do this sort of work and we decide that none of the different versions that string theory gives us match anything that looks like physics in our universe, that would also be interesting.