To people saying the Dark Matter sounds like aether, phlogiston, or miasma, I have to wonder. Dark Matter is simply something that isn't affected by electromagnetic fields. We already have particles that don't interact with one or more forces. The weak interaction only affects fermions and antifermions. The strong force only affects quarks, photos are massless, etc. What's so hard to accept about a particle that doesn't interact with electromagnetism, and thus neither absorbs nor emits light?
The issue is not whether it acts like regular matter.
At issue is, rather, whether observations consistent with DM as formulated should be privileged over others that are not. Current behavior of cosmologists is that inconvenient observations should not count, and need not be paid any attention.
That is why the authors bring up sociological explanations for cosmologists' behavior. It is not scrupulous science.
It's not hard to accept existence of dark matter, but it is an extremely flexible, hard to prove answer. If you see a galaxy that rotates differently, you say it has more or less dark matter. It sounds like an easy answer.
There's probably more, I'm not up on all the particles. My thought is that a) a particle that only interacts with gravity is not prohibited by the Standard Model and b) our inability to detect (yet) such a particle is not proof it doesn't exist.
