They have been taught (incorrectly) that aether was abandoned and disproven, and they have no other option than to mindlessly parrot it, Tom.
Clearly. Now they have abandoned that and are arguing that only one kind of ether can be ether.
The main property of aether is that it is a fixed reference medium that light travels through. The quote YOU found clearly states that quantum foam does NOT have this property. Read more carefully, Tom.
"There is an important difference though: one does not notice motion at uniform speed relative to the quantum vacuum"
You are getting confused because you seem to only do keyword searches and just copy-paste without understanding what you read or the context. Put some effort into understanding these sources.
Incorrect. That is not the "main property of aether". The main property of classical aether was a medium which allows for the propagation of light and magnetism. It was necessary that there was a medium filling the void through which electromagnetic waves could propagate, much like how sound waves travel through the air or ripples through water.
That still exists. The modern vacuum version of ether takes on that responsibility, and is deemed to be a relativistic ether. Professor Laughlin already told us that in the previous quote we looked at:
“ It is ironic that Einstein’s most creative work, the general theory of relativity, should boil down to conceptualizing space as a medium when his original premise was that no such medium existed…. Einstein… utterly rejected the idea of ether and inferred from its nonexistence that the equations of electromagnetism had to be relative. But this same thought process led in the end to the very ether he had first rejected, albeit one with some special properties that ordinary elastic matter does not have. The word “ether” has extremely negative connotations in theoretical physics because of its past association with opposition to relativity. This is unfortunate because, stripped of these connotations, it rather nicely captures the way most physicists actually think about the vacuum.
In the early days of relativity the conviction that light must be waves of something ran so strong that Einstein was widely dismissed. Even when Michelson and Morley demonstrated that the earth’s orbital motion through the ether could not be detected, opponents argued that the earth must be dragging an envelope of ether along with it because relativity was lunacy and could not possibly be right…. Relativity actually says nothing about the existence or nonexistence of matter pervading the universe, only that such matter must have relativistic symmetry.
It turns out that such matter exists. About the time relativity was becoming accepted, studies of radioactivity began showing that the empty vacuum of space had spectroscopic structure similar to that of ordinary quantum solids and fluids. Subsequent studies with large particle accelerators have now led us to understand that space is more like a piece of window glass than ideal Newtonian emptiness. It is filled with “stuff” that is normally transparent but can be made visible by hitting it sufficiently hard to knock out a part.
The modern concept of the vacuum of space, confirmed every day by experiment, is a relativistic ether. But we do not call it this because it is taboo. ”
—Robert B. Laughlin (1993 Nobel laureate in physics), "A Different Universe: Reinventing Physics from the Bottom Down", 2005, pp. 120-121).