"Science" doesn't care about individual careers or generations (in that case of physicists) who are left with "nothing else" to discover (fundamentally) and are simply "condemned" to pass the torch (determining values and uncertainties as best as possible). It's a brutal selection process if viewed from an individual lens which can consciously participate for say at best only 3 generations.
The institutionalized systems - which themselves carry an often underappreciated (in the field itself) or overexaggareted (outside the field) intertia - we now have in place to best approximate "science" are still left with a lot of headroom for optimization.
One of the many corners overlooked handwavingly imhv are for example the attempts to raise scientific literacy (critical thinking, formulating (theoretical) and testing (practical) hypotheses) in the societies overall, the fertile humus, so to speak. Because of the massive shifts/societal changes actually the reverse seems to be happening in the last decades in an accelerating speed. Decentralizing science could help here and is a legitimate concern in the case of the LHC as an example of a highly centralized research model. I find the struggle for a sweet spot appropriate, here.
That being said, it is still possible that we just find ourselves at a local low (at the current level of the LHC) with some arising anomalies but by just pushing the energies a little farther this let's us get out of the hole, again.
So, nobody is arguing to shut the LHC altogether, but depending on what we find, the next "Future Circular Collider" to be built on top of it might simply not be "worth" it in the foreseeable future.
There are more fundamental considerations to be made. For example, the small scale structures of the universe might just be too small to be observable by experimental means. As in, not just practically too small (too difficult to build experiments for it), but fundamentally not possible to observe due to their mathematical structure.
There are already a lot of things in quantum physics particularly that we can't observe directly. For example, there's no such thing as observing separate quarks - if you separate two quarks too much the binding energy between them pops another set of quarks into existence. But you can infer their existence indirectly "via math" basically.
However it's easily possible that the more fundamental structures of the universe are bound in such a way that you can't even observe them indirectly, even if you had access to machines that could produce the energies required.
The institutionalized systems - which themselves carry an often underappreciated (in the field itself) or overexaggareted (outside the field) intertia - we now have in place to best approximate "science" are still left with a lot of headroom for optimization.
One of the many corners overlooked handwavingly imhv are for example the attempts to raise scientific literacy (critical thinking, formulating (theoretical) and testing (practical) hypotheses) in the societies overall, the fertile humus, so to speak. Because of the massive shifts/societal changes actually the reverse seems to be happening in the last decades in an accelerating speed. Decentralizing science could help here and is a legitimate concern in the case of the LHC as an example of a highly centralized research model. I find the struggle for a sweet spot appropriate, here.
That being said, it is still possible that we just find ourselves at a local low (at the current level of the LHC) with some arising anomalies but by just pushing the energies a little farther this let's us get out of the hole, again. So, nobody is arguing to shut the LHC altogether, but depending on what we find, the next "Future Circular Collider" to be built on top of it might simply not be "worth" it in the foreseeable future.