I think he started his company to sell Mathematica - the research agenda stuff has been more recently emphasized. When I first started using Mathematica almost 30 years ago the company was pretty much just selling the tool for technical computing. It was after his book came out around 20 years ago that things drifted more towards his weird research, which really amped up in the last decade.

The biggest complaint I’ve seen about his work, especially the new Wolfram Physics stuff is that it’s a theory without predictions. He pretty much exclusively talks about representing things we already know but in terms of his world of cellular automata and rewriting systems. Until it is applied to make a testable prediction, it’s not as much science as it is gratuitous programming, visualization, and grandiose claims.

It is impressive the sheer volume of self-congratulating text that he can produce. It’s quite hard to read since it spends nearly as much time talking about himself and how insightful he is as it does the technical topics. From the things I’ve read, there isn’t much of value buried in there.

It's not complete bullshit, it just fails to engage with the already existing work on the subject. He's creating his own entire system instead of looking at similar work by others and fitting his theory in with those. If you don't play philosophy on their turf, philosophers won't engage with you.

Most responses are clouded by emotion still. This is a kind of war on reality since the proposal is to pass the torch of Truth-saying from one institution to another. That no heads are being lopped off in more than verbiage is truly great progress in our quest for self-knowledge.