Is There an Ether or Isn’t There?

I posted these questions on Facebook and didn’t receive much response, though I should’ve known that site isn’t the greatest medium (*rimshot*) to field science questions that aren’t in meme format.

I came across the article linked below while doing book research, and it’s actually an excerpt from a book called Transcending The Speed Of Light: Consciousness, Quantum Physics & the Fifth Dimension. If the rest of the book is anything like the article, even a know-nothing-about-science guy like me could understand a lot of it.

1. Why would one experiment (Michelson-Morley experiment) rule out the ether, a concept which had been in place in one form or another for a long time? Why not just modify the theory instead of ditching it completely only to somewhat replace it later with dark matter?
2. Einstein admitted that there needs to be a form of ether. Don’t know if he retracted it later. Did people just think Tesla was too much of a crank about some things that they needed to hate on ether theory so much?

From Tesla vs. Einstein: The Ether & the Birth of the New Physics:

Einstein essentially agreed with the findings by stating that by its nature, the ether could not be detected. However, Einstein also upped the ante considerably by also saying that if the ether could be detected then his theory of relativity was in error.5 Einstein further stated that if light could travel like a particle it would not need a medium (i.e., the ether) to travel through. Even though most of the great scientists of the day such as Maxwell, Faraday, Kelvin, Fitzgerald and Lorentz all accepted the obvious conclusion that there had to a medium of transfer in space, i.e., the ether, all of this was glossed over. This led to a generally accepted conclusion that the ether did not exist and that is the situation today, a full century later! It would take Einstein 15 years before he addressed this glaring misconception but the damage had already been done.