Theories "fitting" or "not fitting" observation cannot explain the history of physics (let alone the history of science).

Right, but they're at least entangled with it, which is what separates scientific disciplines from their predecessors. I completely agree that the history of science is more messy, politics-laden, and irrational than the naive/textbook view acknowledges, but it only takes a weak sustained current (in this case, the fact that the results of experiments sometimes shocked and puzzled scientists) to overcome random noise in time.