It's not necessary to be in favor of anything, in order to criticize what's already out there. You can point out fatal flaws in an idea without needing to have an alternative in mind.
Woit himself is working (pretty casually to my eyes) on some mathematical reformulations of the Standard Model. He's not advocating aggressively for these ideas, and I'm pretty sure if you asked him, he'd say there's no evidence that any one idea should dominate the research landscape the way string theory did. None of what exists out there is particularly compelling. (This is one of the reasons people worked so much on strings. It's the best of a bad lot.)
Woit himself is working (pretty casually to my eyes) on some mathematical reformulations of the Standard Model. He's not advocating aggressively for these ideas, and I'm pretty sure if you asked him, he'd say there's no evidence that any one idea should dominate the research landscape the way string theory did. None of what exists out there is particularly compelling. (This is one of the reasons people worked so much on strings. It's the best of a bad lot.)