Disclaimer: I have no horse in this race, I studied Theoretical Physics but left academia for the industry many years ago. My bills won't be paid whatever side

Disclaimer: I have no horse in this race, I studied Theoretical Physics but left academia for the industry many years ago. My bills won't be paid whatever side of the discussion gets funded. 1. In its canonical formulation we don't know if Loop Quantum Gravity produces the right classical limit (i.e. General Relativity). In its spin-foam formulation we can get the right classical limit but we don't know if the formulation is mathematically consistent. 2. The semi-classical results that LQG obtains, namely Black Hole entropy, is very suspect. The semi-classical result is pretty much cooked in (at least it was years ago when I was studying these things, maybe they have refined the way the calculate it recently) and the logarithmic quantum corrections are wrong (see: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.0971.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1205.0971.pdf). 3. Furthermore, it's questionable how can you come up with a consistent theory of pure-Quantum Gravity that doesn't include all other forces and matter since gravity interacts with everything (that is its most defining characteristic) and in Quantum Mechanics you must include everything that can happen otherwise the diagrams would need to conspire in very peculiar ways to produce consistent results. 4. There are also technical arguments to be made regarding the mathematical construction of the theory: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/67211/why-is-standard-model-loop-quantum-gravity-usually-not-listed-as-a-theory-of-e/360010#360010 https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/67211/why-is-sta... TL;DR: The viability of LQG as theory of Quantum Gravity has always been overstated to the general public. By the classical journalistic trick of giving equal voice to the two sides of the discussion; the reader, with not much else to judge by, has to assume equal plausibility for both sides of the argument. With a bit more careful inspection you would notice that the number of experts paying attention to one side or the other is radically different. So either the entire High-Energy physics community has fallen in some collective delirium and "big physics" conspires to suppress LQG or maybe LQG doesn't deserve as much attention as the general public has been led to believe.