There's also a hidden component in these budget calculations: it is hard for people doing more "traditional" physics to find tenured positions, since many faculty hires went to string theory. So the salary that went to string theorists at the expense of other subareas of physics is quite a large hidden component. Crushed academic ambition is as real-world as it gets, since it involves years of extremely hard toil, wasted.
Totally wild assertion. Most physics departments in the world have only one or two theorists and most of them are not in string theory. And most young physicists don't have the inclination to pursue string theory (even if they had the capability, which many do not).
Taking criticism of string theory hogging all the budget as "it's literally taking over the entirety of physics budgets" instead of "in the field of fundamental high-energy physics, there's no budget left over for alternative ideas to be developed to a similarly detailed level" is strawmanning.
This is just false, string theory only competes in the theoretical physics sub-area; condensed matter, astrophysics, lasers, all that stuff have their own pots of money.
That research budgets are split by subjects many times before arriving to a node where "string theory" is a possible leaf is not a controversial statement, it is reflected in basically all budget documents you will find.
For example, string theory funded by the NSF that "steals" money from laser research is plausibly only found in the "elementary particle physics - theory" program, which is part of the Physics division, which is part of the Mathematical and Physical Sciences Directorate.
sadly the page is pretty shit so the filter selection is probably reset, and they don't label by division program so you'll have to mouse over each one and categorise yourself. As a guide to how much work it is, there was 350 awards in the physics division and about 30 of those in the theory program.
