People need to understand that physicists do NOT consider dark matter to be settled, in any sense! The experiments are not done to polish up any theory... they're done because all of the theories are awful, and guidance from observations is necessary for further progress.
I also still fully stand by my previous comment on this subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666620
Almost every honest physicist will say that. But not all physicists are honest, and I don't trust that there is a positive correlation between honest scientists and loudness in the scientific community, especially where it interfaces with the general public. And if you want an explanation of why dark matter brings out the crazies, I think that's as good a reason as any.
Most of my peers from high school went into high energy physics (one works at JLab, another is a professor at an east coast college; the others quit or went into... other fields, like finance). Although I am no longer a practicing biochemist, when we got together we complained about the exact same things. So yeah, I don't know about the intricacies of what happens in physics. But that doesn't mean I don't have real insight about what's going on.
For example, throughout my career, whatever the commercial domain, there is almost always a noisy competitor whose product is an amateur hour shit-show, usually a superficial clone of the market leader, that still picks up market share from naive customers by sheer volume of message.
When you’re trying to focus on making something that actually creates value for others this can be an irritating distraction. “Pay attention to competitors, but obsess over customers” isn’t always a comfortable mantra to fulfil.
Contrary to your linked comment, to this non-physicist, nearly all physicists in public seem to say that, while the details are unknown, dark matter is pretty much definitely a thing. AFAICT they're not wrong about there being multiple lines of evidence for it. But if you mean "no one worth listening to" says even that much, then I don't know any physicists worth listening to.
It does not seem like it to me (non physicist with some physicist friends from other fields who try to dumb down stuff to me).
In my world (SE) it seems like a proprietary binary that must be included for the rest of an open source product describing the observable universe to work very well. Everyone seems to hate it, but nobody wrote something better, yet. Every competing implementation fails to work in other areas that we already are using in production, extensively.
And when some professional, who read and understood the source code, starts talking about it, a lot of people voice stupid ideas that they would not have if they passed some lectures on the subject.
Edit to add: I envy physicists a little - the best thing for “them” to happen seems to be if something does not work in a very peculiar way.
It was nearly a millenia between the sacking of Rome and the Renaissance. Intellectuals seem to have the idea that we can’t have that type of reset again. As populations options narrow with climate change and vaunted scientists fail to provide solutions, those populations will turn elsewhere.
Because everybody thinks they can "intuit" their way to knowledge.
No. No you can't. We KNOW you can't. We have experiments and statistics and double-blind trials for exactly this reason.
"Intuition" only works when coupled with huge amounts of knowledge and effort.
Part of the problem is that too many people never suffer the consequences of "truth" in modern society. Consequently, far too many people get the idea that "truth" is negotiable.
But, this is not new:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Issac Asimov
The existential confrontation of research processes and discourse is such anathema to a prevailing mindset of certainty and explanation that a psychosis may develop.
So bring your kids up to be comfortable with doubt, to inoculate them against becoming conspiracy nuts.