I’ll preface this with the fact that I am also not a physicist.

String theory isn’t best described as a genre of physics - it really is a standalone concept. Dark matter and black holes are subjects of cosmology, while string theory is an attempt to unify quantum physics with general relativity. Could string theory be used to study black holes and dark matter? Sure, but it isn’t like physicists are studying black holes and dark matter using methods completely independent from one another and lumping both practices under the label string theory as a simple matter of categorization.

You are correct to say that string theory is an attempt at a theory of everything, but what is a theory of everything? It’s more than a collection of ideas that explain a large swath of physical phenomena wrapped into a single package tied with a nice bow. Indeed, when people propose a theory of everything, they are constructing a single mathematical model for our physical reality. It can be difficult to understand exactly what that means, so allow me to clarify.

Modern theoretical physics is not described in the same manner as classical Newtonian physics. Back then, physical phenomena were essentially described by a collection of distinct models whose effects would be combined to come to a complete prediction. For example, you’d have an equation for gravity, an equation for air resistance, an equation for electrostatic forces, and so on, each of which makes contributions at each point in time to the motion of an object. This is how it still occurs today in applied physics and engineering, but modern theoretical physics - e.g., quantum mechanics, general relativity, and string theory - is handled differently. These theories tend to have a single single equation that is meant to describe the motion of all things, which often gets labeled the principle of stationary action.

The problem that string theory attempts to solve is that the principle of stationary action that arises in the quantum mechanics and the principle of stationary action that arises in general relativity are incompatible. Both theories are meant to describe the motion of everything, but they contradict each other - quantum mechanics works to describe the motion of subatomic particles under the influence of strong, weak, and electromagnetic forces while general relativity works to describe the motion of celestial objects under the influence of gravity. String theory is a way of modeling physics that attempts to do away with this contradiction - that is, string theory is a proposal for a principle of stationary action (which is a single equation) that is meant to unify quantum mechanics and general relativity thus accurately describing the motion of objects of all sizes under the influence of all known forces. It’s in this sense that string theory is a standalone concept.

There is one caveat however. There are actually multiple versions of string theory that rely on different numbers of dimensions and slightly different formulations of the physics. You could say that this implies that string theory is a genre of physics after all, but it’s a much more narrow genre than you seemed to be suggesting in your comment. In fact, Edward Witten showed that all of these different string theories are actually separate ways of looking at a single underlying theory known as M-theory. It could possibly be said that M-theory unifies all string theories into one thus restoring my claim that string theory really is a standalone concept.