It's simply unnecessary to pretend its a theory, it is possible to name things without pretending they are theories.
Who did? Dark matter and energy are famously-unsolved problems in physics.
And no, I am not referring to the various MOND theories. They still belong on the same edge of that overton window that it currently occupies.
Overton windows pertain to mainstream opinions [1]. Particle physics shouldn’t be subject to mainstream opinion.
They’re calling out a “the pretense of a theory” of dark matter that we “pretended we resolved” unlike the “different but similarly unexplained phenomena were called in the past.” Where do you see the figurative gap?
In reality, we have General Relativity and the Standard Model. Both theories which have defied falsification to the limits of our instruments. Their unification, unfortunately, demands certain discrepancies be resolved. Dark matter and dark energy being possible solutions to those discrepancies. There is no “theory” of dark matter or dark energy, just a compendium of hypotheses.
OP is wrong. Literally, not figuratively.
One clearly indicates scientists being baffled (a catastrophic conclusion), versus a linguistically tangible substance "dark energy", unnecessarily specific in quantity (energy vs position vs momentum vs ...).
For unexplained phenomena, doesn't it sound alarmingly specific?
Wouldn't specific issues getting their own names not have been more desirable? like "anomalous rotation curves", ...
New observations point to possibility that dark energy might not be fixed in time nor isotropic in space. It strongly reeks of epicycles.
There is an existence of something. Unknown variables aren’t improperly named. The solution to dark energy may be matter, it may be modified gravity (almost certainly not), it might be time bubbles à la timescape (which requires re-figuring the Big Bang, possibly less parsimonious than lambda CDM).
There are terribly-named conventions in science. Dark matter is only one to the degree of explaining confident popular ignorance.
A lot of things might clear up once you remove the assumption that Big Bang was true begining of matter, energy and time, with everything isotropic instead of just temporary state of high temperature (kinetic energy) and density with its own internal structure.
Sure, but now you’ve created a magic variable the literal size of the universe. Why do we have the timescape that we do?
We have the timescape that we have because of what the distribution of mass and kinetic energy is. And why the matter is distributed like that is because it never used to be isotropic, just dense and hot. Asking why this specific distribution is what we got is like a grain of sand thrown up by exploding landmine asking why it observes this specific distribution around itself. By the way it would observe a Hubble law because faster moving grains (relatively) would move farther away during the time that passed since the blast. The correct answer to question about why it's this specific distribution definitely isn't assuming that before the blast there was no space, time or matter even though that could be the simplest mathematical thing to model.