A couple thoughts:
- The author of this clearly disliked the WSJ article, but I don't think they did a good job of explaining why. I'm not saying they're wrong, but this article is very emotional without much concrete criticism. I assume 'woit' is someone famous I should know about but don't and he or she is assuming people will find this sufficient simply because they wrote it. But for someone like me who doesn't know who woit is, it doesn't land as a result.
- I enjoyed the WSJ article and (perhaps naively) thought it did an acceptable job shedding light on an interesting phenomenon that would fly under the radar for many readers. I'd be interested in seeing credible criticism of it, but the article in question declares that providing that information would be "hopeless". In the next sentence, they mention experiencing mental health issues.
- On theoretical physics, my thought, for whatever it may be worth, is that a verified theory of quantum gravity is simply one of the hardest scientific questions of all time. It's something that we should expect would take the entire world hundreds of years to solve. So I'm not at all unnerved or worried about what appears from the outside to be a slow rate of progress. We are talking about precisely understanding phenomena that generally only occur in the most extreme conditions presently imaginable in the universe. That's going to take time to unravel -- and it may not even be possible, just like a dog is never going to understand general relativity.