I think it is. Electric and magnetic fields exist in relationship with the processes that create and shape them. There is no prerequisite "background electromagnetic field" that is universally necessary for all of those processes, to begin with.
The primary difference is that the aether was supposed to provide a universal rest frame, which we now know doesn’t exist, but quantum field theory does posit that the field is a fundamental medium and the particles exist only as perturbations in that field.
Not only that, cosmic plasma filaments carrying charged dust around is the most likely explanation for the "missing" matter and energy that two Nobels were handed out for the, continued, non-discovery.
I do not understand why the Aether was ridiculed, but Dark (Matter|Energy) are not. They both depend on something we can't see or detect in any way, and Occam's Razor dictates that, without further evidence, I have to consider the least complex explanation the probably correct one: Plasma physics is a well understood field that involves the Electromagnetic force, and Cosmology has simply neglected to understand how large plasma currents can scale to.
The irony is, Hannes Alfvén (1970 Nobel Prize winner for his work on Magnetohydrodynamics, also had significant contributions to space science) basically stated that this is the most likely cause of coronal heating, based on the earlier work of Kristian Birkeland (nominated for the Nobel 7 times)... gigantic plasma currents slamming into the Sun at it's polar regions, much like how the Solar magnetic field slams into us at our poles and causes high energy plasma events known as the Aurora.
It's wrong to ridicule aether. It was a theory, the theory was tested, and it turned out to be wrong. Lots of theories are wrong. It's not like scientists at the time were stupid. James Clerk Maxwell believed that an aether was required, and he was literally the first person to write down the full set of equations for electromagnetism. Occam's razor doesn't tell us that aether is less parsimonious than "Literally, time slows down when you go faster. Also, light is a particle and a wave at the same time. Kind of."
Aether suffered from clear problems as an idea as the long list of weird properties it had to satisfy, and the list only got longer and longer. Dark matter isn't like that at all -- it's easy to add to our theories that there's a particle that is invisible but has mass. There's no Michaelson-Morley experiment that's extremely hard to explain.
