What they meant is that understanding the microscopic degrees of freedom, the electrons and ions in a superconductor, does not require field theory. The plain old particle based Schrodinger equations for N electrons interacting with N ions should be absolutely fine.
The problem is that we can't actually do anything with that description, so things like effective field theories help us distill the important parts away.
> Also, I think this is a bit of a strawman - there's a ton of money and effort going into condensed matter physics right now.
While I agree, and I would love to see more progress in particle physics, I also think that comparing the funding landscape of particle physics to condensed matter physics is a little misleading.
New discoveries and incremental improvements in condensed matter physics benefit the world in direct and tangible ways. The frontiers of particle physics left the regime where it can benefit the world long, long ago. The energies are just too high, there's no reason to believe that anything they discover will actually matter to anyone other than satisfying their intellectual curiosity (or spinoff technologies).
I don't want to sound dismissive of particle physics, because I really do believe in doing physics for its own sake, but honestly a better understanding of particle physics is unlikely to benefit us any more than a great new piece of literature, and the price tag on the next generation collider is just mind-bogglingly high.
