Maybe to add to my own point, this gets at an interesting perhaps-philosophical question of the role of models and explanations in science. One extreme, closer

Maybe to add to my own point, this gets at an interesting perhaps-philosophical question of the role of models and explanations in science. One extreme, closer to Asimov's arguments here, could be to say that the point of science is just to write down accurate predictions about the world. If a model allows us to do this accurately, then we might tend to accept the model without concern to whether the model is what we think is "really going on". I'm a bit more comfortable with this style of viewpoint because the proof is in the pudding (or rather the predictions) so it speaks for itself. A more opposing viewpoint could be that the point of science is to develop these models that explain why things happen, not just how they happen. So conservation of momentum is interpreted not just as a description of what happens when bodies move or collide, but also as a reason why they behave as they do. This is a frightening viewpoint because I tend to agree with you that we are very far from really understanding what's going on in physics; for example, imagining that some variant of string theory is true, this could completely change what we think "mass" means, even if the predictions about how objects behave is not very different.