I'm someone who once aspired to be a physicist but who dropped out when I couldn't figure it out. Most string theory always seemed kind of dumb. It started out fairly sensibly modeling the nuclear forces that keep protons from fly apart as them being connected by something string like. We now think gluons basically do that job. But having not got anywhere there it took on a life of it's own trying to be a theory of everything or something like that. Say you try to explain everything as strings and your bit of universe contains two electrons a mile apart. We know they repel. How does that work with strings? Do they ping billions of strings at each other trying to hit each other. It just doesn't seem to really work for anything other than grant applications.
Maybe I'm too dumb to get it but I kind of suspect the theory is just wrong.
Those are unrelated uses of the word string. The first (nuclear physics) is still used today as a classical model of a quantum force. The latter (particles) ultimately grew out of the late work of Einstein.
Sometimes your youthful common sense appraisal of something in the face of overwhelming consensus with orthodoxy was always the right one, but it takes your whole life to be proven out.
I try to think like, It's not that I think I know better. I know I don't have the facts. But I do have the ability to reason, and so you can explain a thing to me in a way that holds water, or fail to.
Maybe I'm too dumb to get it but I kind of suspect the theory is just wrong.