physics redpill: we have fairly good mathematical descriptions of the behaviour of EM phenomena but to this day theres no "real" model of how it works.
"spacetime" gave a "mechanical" model for gravity, a lot of people do not like this idea but all the other alternative proposals equally requiere a "leap of faith" be it for gravity or EM, example:
Electric Universe: a minute atomic nucleus displacement=gravity
Ken wheeler: "counter-space"+ aether (magnetism, EM waves)
Miles Mattis: "B-photon" field=mediator for EM phenomena, "continously expanding mass"=gravity
Maxwell, Tesla, Faraday…: aether= medium for EM waves
if the ""I love science"" crowd tells you you don't know what your talking about this is the quote to use:
Fundamental lectures Richard Feynman:
>The best way is to use the abstract field idea. That it is abstract is unfortunate, but necessary. The attempts to try to represent the electric field as the motion of some kind of gear wheels, or in terms of lines, or of stresses in some kind of material have used up more effort of physicists than it would have taken simply to get the right answers about electrodynamics. It is interesting that the correct equations for the behavior of light were worked out by MacCullagh in 1839. But people said to him: “Yes, but there is no real material whose mechanical properties could possibly satisfy those equations, and since light is an oscillation that must vibrate in something, we cannot believe this abstract equation business.” If people had been more open-minded, they might have believed in the right equations for the behavior of light a lot earlier than they did.
https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_01.html#Ch1-S5
personally I haven't found a theory that is fully satisfactory without requiring something extraordinary like "spacetime" or "counter-space", the "nicest" one I have found is miles mattis and the "B-photon field"