As a non string theorist my understanding was that string theory actually makes quite a lot of empirically verifiable statements, just that those statements are only interesting at either never or extremely high energies.

I think ppl are asuming that sting theory comes from the meme about turning 1+1 = 2 into some massive integro differential equation. The world is rarely so simple.

You are making it sound as though string theorists are asserting some kind of flying spaghetti monster theory. Do you think these people are not genuinely interested in advancing science? That's an ad hom fallacy. There is a difference between a hypothesis being conceptually unfalsifiable and a hypothesis that is incredibly difficult to test from a practical standpoint, or impossible with present energy constraints.