Catastrophe theory developed a bad reputation pretty quickly, today there are many retrospectives of how various fields in the social sciences lost interest

https://is.muni.cz/el/sci/jaro2018/M6201/um/48281991/RosserC...

When i was studying physics in the 1990s with the famous conspiracy (more so than string) theorist Ron Maimon we talked about it and he said it was a pale shadow of the renormalization group approach to phase transitions that was developed just a little bit earlier.