Something that most people don't understand is that most physicists won't talk to the public. What you hear as a layman is usually the few people who have a public axe to grind and bears no resemblance to the majority of the field.
When I was in physics in the early 2000's, the general feeling was that it's a probably nonsense, but having someone out at the far end of the mathematical spectrum like that in your theory group was a good investment. And even if they were doing string theory, there's a good chance they were using it as a vehicle, a kind of generalized, more flexible version of field theory, to poke at some mathematical rabbit hole.
The majority of physicists are not in HEP. The majority of HEP physicists are experimentalists. The majority of HEP theorists are phenomenologists. But phenomenologists aren't generally good fodder for science journalists because statements like, "I'm calculating scattering cross sections in the kaon sector for CP violation measurements" isn't going to get clicks. And the experimentalists are even worse: "I've been working eight hour night shifts for the past two years. I'll probably go back to my home university and spend another couple years processing data to get an estimate for this parameter in this scattering calculation. It might be a fraction of a percent off what we expected!" Faced with that, "I'm playing with a high dimensional extension of quantum field theory to see if I can generate a spin 2 field in an expanding spacetime" sounds really sexy.