Maybe that's a sign that theory research in physics has become iredeemably suspect?
The Swedish bank (not an OG Nobel prize, but effectively one of them) prize for economics pretty much alternates (A) sharing the prize between econometrics (ie. tooling) and empirical research and (B) awarding deep theory.
I would push back on this. Irredeemably suspect? The Nobel committee doesn't make theory awards until they are supported by experiment. There was basically no new particle physics data for 30 years. Then they found the Higgs and that's nothing else. Theory beyond this is speculative, nobody knows if it's important or not.
The Swedish bank (not an OG Nobel prize, but effectively one of them) prize for economics pretty much alternates (A) sharing the prize between econometrics (ie. tooling) and empirical research and (B) awarding deep theory.