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Don't fall for this sensationalist nonsense. No, funding agencies are NOT "pouring money” into "any proposed experiment that could plausibly be said to maybe detect something”. Anyone who knows anything about dark matter searches can confirm
The article misleads readers into thinking that experiment *proposals*, put together with pen and paper and in some cases virtually unknown in the community, are all actual "few million dollars" experiments.
Contrary to what the article claims, it is very difficult to get new dark matter direct detection experiments funded. Even the most successful proposals struggle (and often fail) to find resources for R&D, and it is quite possible that none will eventually be built.
The best chance for an experiment to be funded is to demonstrate that it can address a broad range of problems besides dark matter (e.g. paleodetectors might be used to search for astrophysical neutrinos arxiv.org/abs/1906.05800).
Also not true that there is no systematic effort to learn from astronomical data. See e.g. arxiv.org/abs/1902.01055 for a spectacular counterexample.
Efforts to learn about dark matter from astrophysical data are also discussed in our recent review article arxiv.org/abs/1810.01668
"physicists must think more carefully before commissioning experiments to search for hypothetical particles. They still haven’t learned the lesson."
