[lll-o-lll]

Until you have it properly explained it just looks like a kludge. It’s an obvious extrapolation once a number of fundamental concepts have been understood, but these are concepts you won’t be exposed to outside of a physics university education.

That’s all it is I think. Sabine (and probably others) have done a great job of explaining these concepts for the layman audience.

This article, and so many like it, don’t do that. So the physicist is left shaking their head, and the layman comes away still thinking “what a giant kludge that dark matter is”.