By contrast something like baryon acoustic oscillations are very simple to model, so you can be quite confident that you've incorporated all the relevant processes. And in that regime LCDM performs beautifully and MOND completely fails. So it's reasonable to suspect that in more complicated environments the problem is that we're not modeling the systems correctly rather than that there's new physics going on.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8193356
And, of course, it predicted that the early universe would have bigger and more structured galaxies (which is what the posted article is about).
Dark matter has a slew of problems of its own; it's not the case that LCDM is problem free, despite good success in some areas.
What MOND has going for it is that galactic rotation curves are readily consumed by popsci readers and the story of the "little guy" vs the scientific establishment is an easily available frame story popsci authors can sell clicks for.
The proportion of lay people who think MOND could be true greatly outnumbers the proportion of MOND researchers and doesn't reflect the veracity of the theory.
For something more technical, this article just came out as an overview of the evidence for dark matter: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05062
