In the low-energy fields of physics that I pay more attention to (though not as much attention as I probably should), I don't see this happening to any problematic degree. While these examples certainly make me glad that I don't work in any of those fields, and thus don't have to try to keep up with all this furious activity, I'm not sure that this is really indicative of an academic crisis extending outside of high-energy theory. As secondary and tertiary examples, she points to cosmology and theoretical astrophysics, where "new" models are cranked out with great regularity by making small tweaks to existing models, or adding new fields and particles that have no possibility of being experimentally detected. Hossenfelder points out that in the eight months between the announcement of the "bump" in the data and the announcement that it had disappeared, theoretical particle physicists cranked out something like 600 papers offering explanations for a bump that turned out not to be real. Her main example is the most recent particle-that-wasn't from the Large Hadron Collider, a tantalizing hint of something at an energy of 750 GeV that went away when more data came in.
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