I'm sorry, but string theorists absolutely do prevent funding other research because funding is finite, grad students have to research something their advisors think is worthy, and their advisors have their heads full of "beautiful math" so that's what they tell their students to work on if they want their PhDs, and that's what they hire their post grads to work on if they want a job.
Only now as the strong theory haze has started dissipating are we starting to see novel approaches, like Oppenheim's post quantum gravity theory.
This is a preposterously uncharitable characterization of something that again, was I think a triumph of string theory, the likes of which cannot be claimed by any competing theory. It is a framework for understanding black hole information loss, and it even has specific applications in condensed matter physics for modeling high temperature superconductors.
https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/66/4/9/414412/Stra...
Like I said, Ads/CFT's alleged "successes" are overblown.
As for it being a framework for understanding black hole information loss, it's merely one idea that has questionable application to our universe. We'll see if anything actually useful comes from it.