I think this is being seen in particle physics right now, with CERN campaigning to fund a successor to the LHC that other particle physicists believe has little chance of finding anything new.
I can't name of a global bio experiment looking for international funding to build a massive project.
This unfortunately isn't the case. There is friction because there is a fork in the road for particle physics. If we build or extend the LHC it is fundamentally a p-p hadron collider collider.
There is significant new evidence of new physics in hadron/lepton interactions and from the neutrino sector.
Neutrinos are tricky but we feel we have a handle on these, which is pushing more people to want to build a large clean lepton collider either an e-e or u-u collider.
The problem with a purely leptop collider is that it doesn't tell us too much about hadron physics (hence why the lhc differs so much from Tevatron).
The community itself has elected those who are in charge to review the proposals from the people with different ideas to allow us to form a coherent argument to go to funding councils/countries with.
I cannot name any other academic field which has managed to achieve such a level of international self-governence when designing projects on such a scale.
hurhurhur big think... string theory has at the very least given useful tools for particle and field theory as a research area, saying this doesn't work is like complaining that I can't take home a jar of magnons to show someone
besides there's tonnes of theory people I know who work on completely unrelated theory problems and ways of working that predate or have come after the dawn of string-theory, complaining this hasn't panned out into M-thoery is to a point of almost being absurdist
Normally there's excitement when the research offers some weird or novel tie in or a better way of doing a thing or solving a problem.
But then again these fields don't have the same structure of paymaster.