Well certainly us regularly calling it quintessence or ether probably reinforces that



I'm pretty sure it bothers everyone in the field, even the advocates, certainly I've never seen anyone cheerfully embrace it. It's not as unjustified as all that. We mock ether conceptually post Michelson, Morley, and Einstein but that's not really fair. Ether was a logical principal right until Michelson-Morley started paradoxically measuring the speed of light as the same in all frames, from this we realized there had to be a 'massless velocity' usually called the speed of light but simply the speed at which massless objects moved and since that couldn't change, in part because time is frozen for such objects, then space and time themselves must change for it. Dark Energy is a pretty similar concept, we can measure that distant objects are moving away from us, equally in all directions and faster the further out. We can also now see that they not only move faster, but are gaining speed, accelerating. Now, we don't know why, but based on all prior knowledge, if you want to make something speed up, you need to apply force, and doing that requires energy. We don't know what or where this energy is coming from so we label it 'Dark' because '????' or other four letter words are less preferable, nobody's pretending to know anything about it really, though many theories are advanced of course and one may be right or right in part. This one just goes the other way, and isn't entirely new, by saying 'No it's not accelerating, it just looks like it is because time is moving faster there', or someone has hit the fast forward button on a traffic camera, doesn't mean the car passing through is now speeding.