I know plenty of physicists that would be very pissed off by all this drama.
There is so much more than fundamental physics and there is much more in physics than breakthrough discoveries. Medical physics just to name a fun field everybody always forgets about has been studying and using neural networks since about forty years. Applied physics, biophysics, atmospheric physics. Even particle physics is mostly data science these days.
This idea that physics should only be about fundamental theories and discoveries is really detrimental to the field and leads to the false idea of stagnation that permeates this whole thread.
There is so much more than fundamental physics and there is much more in physics than breakthrough discoveries. Medical physics just to name a fun field everybody always forgets about has been studying and using neural networks since about forty years. Applied physics, biophysics, atmospheric physics. Even particle physics is mostly data science these days.
This idea that physics should only be about fundamental theories and discoveries is really detrimental to the field and leads to the false idea of stagnation that permeates this whole thread.