I wonder if that tells you something about the author's age. Chaos theory was the next big thing in the '80s and '90s - recall that Jeff Goldblum played a chaos theorist in Jurassic Park in 1993! It seems much less exciting today. I think it gave way to string theory, and now we have AI (yet again).

String theory is unproven, and AI is a technology, not a scientific theory.

Here is an article that shares the opinion and gives an overview of key ideas.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1306.5777

It seems like in the late 80s and early 90s this topic was very hot, then became a fad. You can find many books and papers that all have basically the same content (Lorenz/Henon attractors, logistic map, Mandelbrot set). I think it underwent a name change to "complexity science" during the 90s and 00s. I'm not in academia, but I do try to follow the topic because it is truly fascinating and IMO more accessible than quantum or relativity physics because many of the systems involved can be easily programmed/visualized with basic computers.

I've never heard such a thing, but if you think of "chaotic dynamics" as responsible for the dramatic improvement in weather prediction, it might start to make sense.