This is what I LOVE about science. Decades ago, younger scientists had to battle the establishment to get the idea of BHs accepted. Today it's old-hat consensus. Now, along comes someone postulating that the emperor has no clothes, invoking the nascent dark energy phenomenon as a possible radically different explanation. Whether Einstein believed something or not matters not a whit to me but testable theories do. I don't know how falsifyable these claims are but with the continued dichotomy between relativity and quantum mechanics, and the new still tenuous observations of dark energy and the totally unexplained dark matter, there's room for lots of creative imagining in cosmology and a need for follow up observational tests.

Just think, a decade ago folks thought all we had to do was use Hubble to settle the value for Ho and we were done with cosmology.