For what it's worth, it's a very mainstream opinion in the physics community that Hinton did not at all deserve a nobel prize in physics for his work. But that's because his work, and wasnt impactful at all to the physics community
In a recent talk he made a quip that he had to change some slides because if you have a Nobel prize in physics you should at least get the units right.
Now perhaps Hinton does deserve the award, but certainly it should not be because of the reasons you cite: money and popularity.
You refuted an argument about being honest about accepting an award on the basis that the award pays a lot of money and grants one a great deal of popularity.
If your argument didn't involve money and popularity, then why did you choose those two specific criteria as the justification for accepting this award?
I want to be clear, I am not claiming that Dr. Hinton accepted the award in a dishonest manner or that he did it for money, I am simply refuting your position that money is a valid reason to disregard honesty for accepting a prestigious award.
There are two reasons why Hinton got the prize.
A good majority of modern physics research depends on ML in some aspect. Look at the list of talks at any physics conference and count the number of talks that mention ML in the title.
And the 'physics community' has not produced any fundamental physics for a while. Look at the last several years of physics nobel prize. You can categorize the last ten years of prizes into two categories: engineering breakthroughs, and confirming important predictions. Both are impportant, but lacking fundamental physics breakthroughs, they are not clearly ahead in impact compared to ML.
The setup by itself can also general technique that is useful beyond confirming one thing (example LIGO). But then, ML is itself is a more general technique that has enabled a lot more new physics than one new experiment.
And a large number of predictions being made now are unlikely to be ever confirmed.