There's one correlation I find really interesting here. The time frame where physics started to "dry up" as the article puts it, corresponds extremely strongly

There's one correlation I find really interesting here. The time frame where physics started to "dry up" as the article puts it, corresponds extremely strongly with the transition away from a strong connection between experimental:theoretical physics. Instead theoretical physics began to more actively just build upon itself with extensive use of model driven tests. The biggest issue with using models as a tool in science is that they start to become unfalsifiable. To avoid the hornet's nest of modern models consider geocentricism - the belief that Earth was uniquely at the center of the solar system, universe, and everything. In times before telescopes this belief was justified by models. If you assume this is true, then you get some really bizarre behavior from the planets that now orbit the Earth. In particular some planets will suddenly stop and start moving the other way, most planets will travel in 'swirly' patterns, and so on. But when you have a model none of this matters. Planets need to go backwards? Sure, why not. They travel in swirlies? Sure, why not. So you get these increasingly convoluted and complex theories, but in spite of how irrational they seem - they are supported by what we see. But at some point you're going to reach a dead end when the model becomes so intractable that it becomes impossible to juryrig yet another observation into it. And it's only at that point that we start to scratch our head and wonder what's going on. And finding the problem there can be inconceivably difficult because it can be something far more fundamental than you'd ever look for. For instance in a geocentric universe you might search for why planets travel in swirlies. Yet you're at a much higher level than the actual problem - which is that they don't actually travel in swirlies. And in this toy example things are much better than they might be in our reality. There you're only a couple of 'fundamentals' separated from the real problem. With our rapid pace of publication and 'stair stepping', models advance and build upon themselves exponentially more rapidly. Like a single cog in a clock breaking, all it takes is a single falsehood be assumed as truth in a model to begin to undermine the entire phenomenally complex system.