Is particle physics full of fraud?

The physicist Sabine Hossenfelder has become famous, and infamous, among the scientific community, especially among the particle physics community, for being highly critical of how the entire field is being currently run. And most other physicists in the field really hate her for that. She has, in many ways, become essentially the enemy #1 of that particular field of physics (and to some extent the physics scientific community at large.)

But not for the reasons you might expect (ie. identity politics), but what for all intents and purposes is fraud.

Particle physics made progress in huge leaps during the majority of the 20th century, and new discoveries on that field were made almost by the week. All of this was not just theoretical and to satisfy our curiosity. All that research has resulted in some of the most important technological discoveries and advancements in human history, such as the discovery of the properties of semiconductors, the invention of transistors (one of the most fundamental discoveries of all of history of humanity), and countless inventions and advances in electronics and other related fields, which has given us the electronic hardware we currently have.

However, according to Hossenfelder (and she's not the only one pointing this out), over the last decades the discoveries and advances made by particle physics has significantly slowed down and, especially, has become staggeringly expensive, but giving very few new discoveries and very little useful results.

Billions and billions of dollars are being spent every year on bigger and bigger, and more and more advanced particle physics projects. Seems like every few years they are once again building the next multi-billion-dollar particle accelerator, bigger than anything that has come before. Billions and billions of dollars are being spent every year on such research projects.

And for what? What have those billions of dollars sunk into particle accelerators and other similar projects given us? Not just in terms of practical applications, but outright in terms of new knowledge about the universe?

Not much, really. We got that "higgs boson" thing some decades ago. Didn't result in any practical applications, but at least a hypothesis was kind of confirmed. At the cost of billions and billions of dollars.

What else? What have we got besides some useless research papers?

Yet, particle physicists want more and more money spent on these egregiously expensive megaprojects, using all kinds of fancy arguments about why they are so necessary, but which don't result in anything useful, not even in terms of new information, much less practical applications.

But it's not merely that these billions of dollars are being wasted on useless megaprojects. Hossenfelder posits, and she has some evidence to back it up, that there's actually borderline fraud going on behind the scenes. It's not just delusional physicists being blinded by cool megaprojects. There are indications that many of these megaprojects are outright fraudulent (at least borderline so).

How so? In that these physicists are outright misleading governments and scientific organizations with very fancy-sounding arguments and terminology in order to get the billion-dollar funding, knowing perfectly well that they are just mostly spouting meaningless (although scientifical-sounding) technobabble. They are greatly exaggerating the importance of the projects, knowing perfectly well that it's nothing but a ruse to get a huge amount of funding for a nothingburger, all that money being thrown on fancy equipment and megaprojects that they know will yield almost no useful results.

As mentioned, she is not just claiming this. She has shown some evidence that this is indeed the case (ie. both that these projects are mostly fraudulent and, particularly, that the people running these projects know it perfectly well and are doing it on purpose in order to secure huge funding and grants.)

She is not the only one who knows this and acknowledges this. However, she's almost the only one who is daring to openly speak up about it, and criticize it. All the others who know this and are apprehensive about it are too scared to speak up, because it's their job and reputation on the line, so they mostly keep quiet.

One of her major criticism of why this fraud is detrimental is not merely that it's a waste of money, but that it, perhaps ironically, is bound to slow down actual scientific and technological progress. That's because not only is huge amount of funding being wasted on useless projects, it thus being away from actual useful project, but also because it distracts scientists from researching fields and topics that could actually produce useful results. While they are playing with their multi-billion-dollar toys and writing metric tons of completely useless publications, actual useful scientific research is being neglected.

And she is being constantly attacked, derided and insulted by other physicists because of this.