Completely agreed. In the era of concordance cosmology, one can, if desired, use the relative abundance of the elements, the distribution of galaxies in the sky

Completely agreed. In the era of concordance cosmology, one can, if desired, use the relative abundance of the elements, the distribution of galaxies in the sky, and the distance to far-away supernovae and, with two free fit parameters (dark-energy and dark-matter density) predict the properties of the Cosmic Microwave Background anisotropy. It's an incredible fact that one can do this -- predicting the properties of the photons emitted at the very first instant that the universe became willing to allow a photon to propagate freely. A young Randall Munroe could have picked from a number of really well-motivated reasons to state, "Science, It works...", but he picked this one: https://xkcd.com/54/ https://xkcd.com/54/ Modern precision cosmology works really, really well.