Science has to be falsifiable or else it's just a new type of faith.
As far as "not affecting your quality of life at all", people have been saying this about cutting edge science since forever. "Time can't be relative, it's just scientists playing with math. Besides, we'll never travel fast enough for it to matter and it doesn't affect our lives anyway." Yet time dilation is an important factor in your daily life if you ever used GPS.
A lot of people like to pursue knowledge purely out of curiosity. Some people even think that having a good quality of life means that there is room for these sorts of conversations!
People will always ask "where everything came from" questions. And if there is no science with plausible big-bang => background radiation... theories, you can just as easily return back to creationism.
Finding a theory of everything could unlock many new practical improvements. Falsifiability not only happens when you can disprove something with a physical experiment. You can't trigger another big-bang, but with a better model, you can falsify the currently accepted theory because it makes a prediction.
Thinking about the end of the universe is not that pointless though. It's tending towards philosophy, which could make people think what's our role in the world, can we at some point exist again, I think the list is long.
It's a fallacy to believe that people are specifically researching the end of the Universe. We research models. The standard model for example is parameterized by six numbers. You measure those six numbers, put them in the model, and the model will tell you how old the universe is and what will happen in the far future.
If it turns out that different probes yield incompatible sets of values for those six numbers, for example probes from the early universe vs more current probes (e.g. the cosmic microwave background vs super novae data), then the model must be wrong. Then we might look for another model, perhaps one with seven parameters, where the additional parameter characterizes the evolution of dark energy, which assumed to be constant until now, and see if that fits better. And what do you know, that model might yield a different result for the age of the universe and its fate.
It's a consequence of fundamental research, not a primary goal in itself.
Do you mean that we will not be able to witness the fate of the Universe? But this very article shows the case when the theory about a Universe fate was falsified or at least came close to it. If a theory is making predictions, and one can check them, then it is a falsifiable theory. Simple models of Universe make predictions, like "you will get the same rate of an expansion however you measure it", and oops... different methods give different results.
I believe you are confusing a falsifiable theory and pragmatic knowledge. We are really cannot predict any practical applications for these kind of theories. So they are not pragmatic. But they are falsifiable.
Even "the end of the universe", just because something is in the future doesn't mean you can't make scientific predictions about it based in your understanding of physics.
Sometimes “useless” facts, theories and discoveries become useful. Like say Boolean algebra.
I mean, imagine we do find the answer to a cause of the big bang or the fate of the end of the universe, there might as well be some knowledge in there that allows new kinds of engineering that can be useful for daily life
E.g. (silly example): understanding how to create a big bang might allow creating an entire universe from scratch with minimal compute resources, in which we can then game