The effect does not seem likely to be very strong to me. What we would need for this to be a problem is serious long-term delays in progress. A few short term delays would actually be acceptable in this context.
Consider that:
There are a lot of hidden benefits and costs to be considered.
Would healthy people use it, like the comic suggests? If so, would it be a net negative or a net positive?
It is not clear to me that even STEM people using this on an individual basis is a bad thing for progress -- e.g. some might use it to get past phases of cultural boredom that would otherwise trigger a counterproductive binge of video gaming or scientific crankery. In fact, it might remove counterproductive cranks at a higher rate than productive rationalists, because they (presumably) have lower satisfaction with their current lives.
The worst hidden costs I see are essentially apathy and inertia related. If you can "fix" the problem by putting it in a freezer, you haven't really fixed it yet. Say we use this on homelessness/joblessness/insurancelessness. Huge potential economic savings there -- but then where's the motive to take people out of the freezer? Perhaps as a sanity measure it should be required that healthy individuals be brought out every 4 years or so to participate in the political process.
I've been considering lately whether it would perhaps be best to develop and promote terminology that splits cryonics into two distinct concepts for easier consumption:
1) old-style cryonics, cryopreserving people at the cost of nontrivial damage that can't yet be reversed, and
2) the tech goal of being able to demonstrably bring someone back from a (very low-damage) cryopreserved state.
"Real cryonics" vs "sci-fi cryonics", if you will.
As I reckon it, trying to achieve cryonics definition #2 in your lifetime is no more incredible on the surface than trying to defeat aging or engineer self-improving AI in a similar timeframe. Actually in some ways it seems easier. Yet it gets so much less press. Even cryonics advocates seem rarely prone to enthuse about it.
Is it possible that cryonics #1, as a feature of the collective mental map, is actually in the way of cryonics #2? Should I be worried, for example, that promoting cryonics #1 actually costs 100,000 lives per day over some stretch of future time because it is preventing people from noticing cryonics #2 and actually taking action on it?
Many people I talk to who are new to the topic seem to have some hazy preexisting idea of cryonics #2 that gets mangled up with cryonics #1. Perhaps they would grow into enthusiasts with attention spans for the subject matter if encouraged to pursue this simple-to-grasp concept in its own right, instead of trying to forcibly retrain into more advanced concepts.