Hasn't it just been subsumed by AdS/CFT now? IIUC that's a layer of abstraction but still primarily string theory under the hood. That's still an active area isn't it? Or is that dying too?
I've heard AdS/CFT described as a correlation between something that doesn't describe our universe (which is maybe de-Sitter, but definitely not anti-de-Sitter space) and something else that doesn't describe our universe (the fundamental forces are not describable with a conformal field theory).
