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.
