My limited impression of physics is that there is a tendency for mathematically convenient but "not real" descriptions to turn out to be either subtly inaccurate, or to actually correspond to something real. For example, negative frequency photons seem to have some element of reality to them, along with the quantum wave function and virtual particles. I assign some non-trivial probability weight to "either sums over histories are inaccurate descriptions of what happens, or they correspond to something that acts a lot like a real thing", even when knowledgeable physicists say they aren't a real thing.