Sort of like if 19th century scientists would have just observed Mercury's perihelion advance and called it "dark perihelion" without postulating Vulcan or modified Newton or relativity.
It does make one positive claim as a hypothesis: that we don't need to modify our model of gravity, only our model of particle physics.
Whereas MOND, the competing hypothesis, says we need to modify our model of gravity and not our model of particle physics.
Of course, it's also possible that we will end up needing to modify both.
In those terms, the planet Vulcan hypothesis was basically the analogue at the time of dark matter--whereas the eventual solution, General Relativity, was the analogue of MOND.
So now you have a new field, which doesn't participate in any of the non-gravitational Standard Model interactions, and is only detectable by its gravitational effects. Which is...dark matter!