The good thing is, it does not matter. It is entirely possible the electrons are not "real" -- so what? The electric field is not "real" either (in the sense th

The good thing is, it does not matter. It is entirely possible the electrons are not "real" -- so what? The electric field is not "real" either (in the sense that there is no corresponding physical object), and the magnetic field is even less "real", it is just a change in electric field. As long as there is predictive power, we can use a theory. And once we discover there are unpredicted cases, we can update the theory. In particular, the reason phlogiston theory was discarded was not some philosophical reasons -- it was because it made bad predictions (specifically, that things always lose mass when burned). There is a beautiful exercise in where you take two very basic physics rules (electrostatic force between two individual charged particles and speed of light equation), and derive basically entire electromagnetic theory from it. Really drives the point that underlying physics is simple, and most of the formulas, especially introductory ones, are just shortcuts to make reasoning and computation easier.