But "seeing fractals" feels like a cheat of saying, things have a similarity as you change scale. This could be true even if you think things reduce to strings/loops/whatever. Such that contrasting fractals to strings feels off.
Still a neat and fun article.
That said, she makes the following observation at the end of the interview: "Asymptotic safety could be compatible with these other approaches. Perhaps at the fundamental scale there are strings or loops or something, but then as you zoom out you hit a realm where things change so slowly for a while that it looks as if you’re at a fixed point."
So while asymptotic safety is not fully compatible with string theory, the physical difference between them could be very small.
On things happening strangely at different scales, I confess I always thought this had to have some parallel to how basic scaling itself changes for values between zero and one. Fun to read more on it.
What it’s really about is criticality(1), a point between chaos and order where all the interesting things happen.
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-organized_criticality