Your characterization of the development of coordinate-free differential geometry is incorrect. Intrinsic geometry was not a seemingly "useless" generalization; it was motivated by concrete and specific problems about surfaces and mathematical physics. For example, one of Riemann's papers was literally titled "A mathematical work that seeks to answer the question posed by the most distinguished academy of Paris." (Perhaps not literally, given that's a translation, but you get the point.)
I don't know anything about ZX calculus, but if people are using it to solve real-world problems, that sounds good to me. What I object to is pure mathematicians giving "applications" of their work that aren't useful or real. And when the authors allude to applications in chemistry and biology, and no chemists or biologists are doing anything with category-theoretical analyses of Petri nets, I think it's reasonable to point this out.
Do you expect something that's useful to be immediately acknowledged as such in the field, much less adopted?
Human cultures are more complex than that. Capitalistic pressures to produce results have had a noted impact on research and development. There will likely need to be a practitioner willing to do the field work to bring about the big "Aha!" for that field. Based on the silo'd history of so many fields, it's a safe bet to say that may be necessary in every field where CT can be applied.
Yes, I expect practitioners to care about something useful, assuming the result has been properly written up and explained in a way they can understand. Scientists want good results and will adopt new tools if you can make a case that they will help them publish impactful papers.
Again, it's pretty telling specific applications aren't mentioned, and instead there's just vague gesturing. How can we expect scientists to "do the field work" necessary to bring the applications to fruition if we can't even tell them what those applications are?
Also, regarding your first sentence, the vast majority of influential mathematics was indeed "immediately acknowledged," because it made progress on some important problem. Perfectoid spaces are a recent example.
Nice, if everyone thought like you do, number theory wouldn't have existed, elliptic curves along with it, and hence much of public key cryptography as well. Indeed, number theory has been exquisitely useless for a couple of millennia, give or take.
I feel you are one of those people that just hate category theory because they consider it too abstract and useless for any purpose. We get that a lot, from a lot of people. Still, since Grothendieck, categorical methods are absolutely central in modern algebraic geometry and topology, and this centrality is only destined to grow, because CT is the best theory we have to manage emerging complexity in describing systems. In my opinion, the approach of "if it's not immediately useful then it's useless" really will lead you farther and farther away to understand modern developments in applied mathematics.
I don't know anything about ZX calculus, but if people are using it to solve real-world problems, that sounds good to me. What I object to is pure mathematicians giving "applications" of their work that aren't useful or real. And when the authors allude to applications in chemistry and biology, and no chemists or biologists are doing anything with category-theoretical analyses of Petri nets, I think it's reasonable to point this out.