It may rlelate to string theory. Advanced physicists believe there is a substrate to space called strings, from which fields come and particles are formed from. So 'space' is indeed nothingness but underlying it there is something from which quarks are made.

The E/M field whose vibration makes light or photons is kind of the aether, or an aether. All photons travel in it at the speed of light, and the weird thing is that light is in kind of special state where it does not experience time; it is frozen in its time. So photons that were created billions of years ago at the start of the universe have been travelling all this time and yet for them, no time has passed from their perspective. They 'oscillate' and yet they do not 'know' they are oscillating. Special relativity theory bears this out.

The idea of the aether is interesting and I am not convinced we have disproven it yet.