One major difference between cryptophysicists and cryptozooligists is that the public is generally able to perceive that the latter are outside the mainstream. Everyone knows from daily experience that there probably aren’t yeti or sea monsters hanging around. Modern physics is abstracted enough from everyday lives and intuition, though, that many people, including some journalists, honestly can’t tell when someone’s waaay out there.
I think people are more familiar with mythology than physics, and the results of relativity and quantum mechanics being so downright weird, it’s harder to say what’s possible and what isn’t. Which makes cryptophysics and crackpottery harder to discern from each other, and from established science. Credulous media doesn’t help.
I wonder if things like string theory have made this worse. No, I don’t — I’m sure it has.
I haven’t actually seen much pickup of string theory jargon in the crankosphere. Doubtless it’s out there, but judging from my (biased) sampling, they’re still chewing on Heisenberg and Bohr, with a foetid seasoning of Chopra.
And whatever the status of the science, I think media reporting has made it fantastically worse, as through laziness and/or incompetence they give air time to anthropically-tinged “Multiverse” speculations while giving nary a nod to, say, gauge/gravity duality and the AdS description of strongly coupled fluids. What else could we expect? The “Multiverse” business plugs into ready-made narratives, like your basic clash-of-science-and-religion story; when people complain that string theory isn’t going anywhere, they get to play David against the Goliath of the scientific community, which is another narrative winner. By contrast, talking about the workaday business of the field is hard.
Try to learn any actual science from the polemic which infests the place, and you’ll be up a certain malodorous creek without a paddle.