> And then of course, there's the frequent crackpots. Pretty much anyone within a science discipline who is even decently well known, especially if they're in physics, gets multiple emails a day from crackpots about how their theories are going to "totally blow a hole in the established knowledge"

I think at this point most of these people talk to chatbots instead, anecdotally the crank flow seems to have lessened.

Yes, until they send over an AI hallucinated manifesto which is 100x longer than the email would have been.