okay so i saw a video that claimed that you can get all of special relativity without fixing light speed

and it seems that's true.

and i know that you can get (presumably) all of QED via pilot wave stuff, which has no 'quantum weirdness' (except for non-locality, but nobody cared about that before einstein).

so is all the last hundred years of physics just people caring too much about single interpretations of much broader ideas?