Yep. I've been hearing mentions of this guy's theories from pop science publications for years even though, as the article says, "The idea has found no support in the astrophysical community—over the last decade, Chapline’s papers on this topic have garnered only single-digit citations."

The pop science press is depressingly bad.

"Dark Energy Star" is pure marketing speak, and the pop science press loves sexy terms like that, whereas to serious physicists a hyphy phrase like that is going to throw all sorts of red flags, the same way an engineer would be appalled by someone boasting about Chaos Engineering. It's usually referred to as the Cosmological Constant instead.

I would much rather live in a world where this person may be heard than likewise.

"Don't take refugee in the false security of consensus."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z2uzEM0ugY

Never trust credentials for "leaps and bounds thinking". Trust credentials for incremental, linear thinking....

There's a certain nominative-deterministic inevitability to all this. There are these things called black holes that apparently are a full of a lot of stuff and aren't completely understood. And there's this mysterious stuff called dark matter that has to exist but seems to be hiding. My mom would be yelling "'Come on guys, join the dots". And who would blame her.

You seem to be thinking that nobody considered black holes as dark matter candidates, but that's not the case. The two big theories around the origin of dark matter are called WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) and MACHOs (massive compact halo objects), and MACHOs include black holes. The reason MACHOs aren't widely accepted is because the evidence (e.g. lensing measurements) doesn't suggest there are nearly enough massive invisible objects to account for a significant portion of the dark matter.

I'd kinda worked out that people who know about this stuff didn't think it was a good account. Was more remarking that calling things dark and black (and, indeed, wimps and machos) sort of invites simplistic and erroneous pop-science assumptions.