But dark matter no longer is particularly simple. At the time of its initial proposal it was little more than unobserved masses, which could have been something as simple as e.g. red dwarves. And so it made sense to reference dark matter as a place holder. But over time as we've discovered things are even more off, dark matter itself has started to morph into our 2000 pound Gaelic speaking deer. Now it comprises the vast majority of all matter in the world, it can't be baryonic, it mustn't interact with anything except itself and gravity, we need to have entire galaxies made of nothing but dark matter, and so forth, and so on. Add now add in the whole slew of experimental failures to detect it, as null hypotheses, and it features ever more exotic conditions as well.
And on the topic of those test failures, every single test we make to detect dark matter, which everything we hypothesize about it indicates we should be able to measure, says it's not there. This should not be a problem except for the fact that we've performed alot of experiments at this point to try to detect dark matter of all sorts, with increasingly high precision. And they've all returned a strong negative. With Bayesian logic it's almost surprising we haven't had a false positive yet, given all the failures.
I really do think the geocentric model has a lot in common here. Prior to Newton's discovery of strong mathematical indicators for gravitational mechanics, heliocentricism had long been proposed. And it was in many ways a much more simple explanation for many phenomena than geocentricism, which over the centuries became ever more convoluted and complex. The 'petal weaving' geocentric astronomic models are enough to boggle the mind even today. But one of the big problems was not even the church, it that there was an immense amount of academic work based around a geocentric model. As but one example astrology, which was considered a scholarly and academic pursuit in the past, was based heavily on the assumptions of a geocentric universe. For instance Mercury starting to 'go backwards' (which was required to glue together a geocentric astronomic view) is still a part of astrological 'theory' today.
Alternatives to dark matter look increasingly more likely with every failure of experiment designed to test it. And these alternatives need substantial refinement, but I think really the biggest issue with them is that if dark matter is not correct it would basically destroy more than a century of astronomical and cosmological work. Nearly everything we know about the cosmos is predicated on the assumption of dark matter. If it turns out dark matter is not the issue, we're looking at setting astronomical and cosmological work in many areas back a century. It would be, by fair, the biggest failure in modern science. So there is reason that alternatives to dark matter are held to a higher standard than dark matter itself, beyond simplicity - which dark matter no longer really is.