I'm still not sure what about the Higgs excited the general public. Or why it hasn't applied to e.g. gravity wave detection, especially since that one is much easier to explain and understand.

Blame it on the decision of the publisher of a certain book to take a phrase from an early draft "that goddamn particle", drop a syllable and change anotherone and make it the title of that book "the god particle".

It catered to a certain part of the population, and snowballed from there.

Add the success of "Da Vinci Code" which has no specific relation. But then add it's prequel "Angels & Demons" which uses antimatter from CERN to destroy Vatican.

Then add the crap about LHC creating a black hole and destroying the universe and you have 500 TV stations at the launch of a particle accelerator. The specific experiment that was happening at the time didn't matter much.