>which has continued to add epicycles to dark matter theory to an extent that is starting to make even true believers uncomfortable.
You certainly get this impression from pop-sci, but are there prominent people in the field actually saying this? Obviously sometimes the scientific consensus can be wrong (see the planetary nebula 'debate' for example) but normally contrarians turn out to be incorrect.
From my layman perspective, either cosmologists enjoy lying down in front of buses or the field advances way faster than they could possibly be dying off.
In areas where prevailing theory lines up with reality.
Where it doesn’t, you get situations like dark matter: theoretically consistent extensions with the framework where it intersects with reality or the additions of free variables to make it just so.
You certainly get this impression from pop-sci, but are there prominent people in the field actually saying this? Obviously sometimes the scientific consensus can be wrong (see the planetary nebula 'debate' for example) but normally contrarians turn out to be incorrect.