re: Dark matter and dark energy.

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young physicists are flocking to the field because there is a ton of funding and it's not popular to speak against it.

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Yes, funding has risen because of the breakthroughs recently. Gravity waves have been discovered, the Higgs boson has been observed, the String Theory has united the quantum and relativity worlds and many more achievements in science have been documented. In fact, advances are coming so fast it's hard to keep up. If I was just entering college I'd definitely major in physics and pursue a job in the field after graduation.

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It's like they found a math that explained or avoided singularities and began to fill in the theory around it.

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String Theory is much more straight forward than that. There's no need for filler.

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I mean do you really believe in all these supposed extra curled up dimensions of spacetime that are undetectable to three dimensional beings that live on our tiny speck of a planet?

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I don't use the word "believe" because it indicates acceptance without evidence.

Yes, the theory predicts 10 dimensions, 11 if you count spacetime. We experience four of them in our macro world, the three classic dimensions plus spacetime.

The quantum world is subject to the other 7, no doubt. They probably explain entanglement and quantum tunneling, for example. Work is ongoing.

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Just look at how many versions of string theory are out there.

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There's only one string theory that's generally recognized by the scientific community since Edward Witten blew away the competition by showing that the five competing string theories were all the same.

It's as solid as the theory of gravity now. Of course, we still don't know what gravity is but we know it exists. The same can said for strings now that the theory is explaining more and more about the quantum world.

The article you linked says that an experiment to detect strings would require an investment equal to the GDP of the entire earth. That's the situation at this time only. More progress in the field will bring the cost down as it has for gravity waves and every other scientific mystery that once seemed out of reach.