Our knowledge of atoms started as spherical marbles.
You're nitpicking over the fact if something is an hypothesis, a model, a theory ot a law. I'm not that interested in those sorts of semantic discussions since they are fairly subjective and contextual.

Physics most of the time moved forward by people "making stuff up" to fill unexplained observations.

I can take your argument and extend it to neutrinos shortly after they were discovered. By your logic, equating them to "real" matter does not make sense.