Well this is kind of funny and I mostly agree so TLDR: > "I’m afraid all of this sounds rather negative. Well. There’s a reason I left particle physics. Particle physics has degenerated into a paper production enterprise that is of virtually no relevance for societal progress or for progress in any other discipline of science. The only reason we still hear so much about it is that a lot of funding goes into it and so…
This part also stand out to me. It is unfortunate that a science communicator would express her research preference in such a way. It is true there were no breakthrough in ages in the particle physics (standard model works extremely well), it is true "paper production" has disproportionate influence on funding (applicable to academia in general), personally I'm excited about the recent deployment of Webb space telesc…
Even if we suppose that the standard model is completely correct, it does not allow the computation of the majority of the useful physical quantities.
What is needed is a model that would be able to compute all the physical quantities that are important in practice, e.g. the masses of all hadrons and of all atomic nuclei, also their magnetic moments, the energies of their excited states, the energies of the excited states of the atoms and of the ions, and so on, starting from the properties of the elementary particles and of their interactions.
Despite the huge progresses which have happened in experimental physics, we are now no closer of having a useful theory able to compute what we need ab initio, than we were exactly one hundred years ago, before the most influential work in quantum physics was published by de Broglie, Schroedinger, Heisenberg, Dirac, Born et al (from the point of view of the computable values, the Dirac theory of the hydrogen atom was only a minor improvement over what could be done using the Wilson-Sommerfeld quantization condition from 1915 and the more complex systems remained uncomputable; the quantum field theory improved a little the precision of some previously computable values, but only very few other additional quantities became computable ab initio).
All the useful applied physics, e.g. the theory of the semiconductor devices, or theory of the lasers, and any other theory used to design real devices, do not have any use for the standard model, but they use various empirical mathematical models, which contain lots of parameters that are determined experimentally, in order to match the predictions of those models with the experiments.