There is no one-to-one correspondence between quantum fields and physical states due to gauge freedom and therefore quantum fields can not be real things. No experiment can yield the value of a quantum field at some point in space and time without fixing a gauge.

We invented quantum fields to make locality obvious but this is not possible without making the description redundant and so we just declared that one physical state corresponds to an entire equivalence class of mathematical states.

So I really don't think this is a matter of philosophy, they are not equivalent models.