You wrote "What if there's no such a thing as <something we have studied and understood in detail for decades> and we've been observing interactions with <something we hypothesise might exist but we know next to nothing about> all along?"
Why did you jump to the conclusion that the well understood thing should be replaced by the new and unknown thing?
It doesn't seem to me like a big leap of logic to go from something being shown to be influenced by a so far unknown particle and the same thing being the result of interactions with this particle.
Why did you jump to the conclusion that the well understood thing should be replaced by the new and unknown thing?