I suspect that feeling you have is because collectively we don't yet fully understand what light is. That's why theories about it are still not as elegant and simple as the material phenomenon is in its esssence.

About visitors from the future or an extraterrestrial civilization dropping subtle hints in our field of consciousness to nudge us all toward higher technology - there's an immense space of unimaginable possibility that we probably wouldn't even notice what happened until we reach the next level of that transformation and evolution, and reflect on how we got there.