I'm quite confident in guessing that you've never had any first hand contact with experimental physics research.

If you did, you'd know that most people aren't there for "the income", but because they enjoy advancing physics.

Yes, sure, if there's a non-discovery, physicists will move on to the next best thing which is "... can we still learn something new about how the universe works?" They won't "just make some shit up".

Counter-point: non-discoveries do happen all the time, and we can look how they turned out. Nuclear fusion has been failing for decades, and scientists "making shit up" is extremely rare. In 40 years one team tried making shit up (cold fusion) and got wrecked by the scientific community.