The aether that didn’t exist has been replaced by the quantum noise that does exist.
Same way the theory of continental drift which was totally impossible according to most has been replaced by plate tectonics that makes sense.
Add in all the new talk about dark matter and dark energy. Hubble interpreted redshift as an indication of an expanding universe because he had no choice—we had discarded the notion of ether. With the inclusion of matter and energy we cannot se, however, I wonder if we have to begin to question how we interpret redshift: is it merely a Doppler effect, or an interaction with intervening dark matter or dark energy? Put another way, is it just a form of scattering or something similar, and only an indicator of distance? That would have profound implications for the size or age of the universe. The second people started talking about dark matter as if it exists a lot of alarm bells startted going off in my head—space would no longer be empty, and it was the emptiness that mandated an expanding universe and a Big Bang.