The scenario as I have found it historically --

*Einstein appears to have sub-contracted his maths out to other people; he was never any good himself at maths. So, the maths that comes from him is a mix of different maths mistakes.

* Although we commonly led to believe that Einstein overthrew Newtonian physics in 1919 -- really the completed version of physics came in the mid-18th century after Newton's death, when the Royal Society agreed that the completed version of Newton's theory was Boscovich's theory. Boscovich's theory was then known thereafter as Newtonian theory. i.e. there was too versions of Newtonian theory -- (1) the uncompleted version as left by Newton and (2) the Boscovich version. This FACT gets lost.

*The maths of Special relativity has mistakes in it. Newtonian theory is still able to deal with the MM experiment -- that is the Boscovich version of Newtonian theory with its Galilean relativity.

*A lot of people get diverted into attacking relativity in general; claiming all relativity wrong. But pre-Einstein there was an existing relativity theory that of Galileo.

*The Einstein crowd do their maths wrong for Special Relativity, then they have difficulty dealing with gravity/acceleration because of doing it wrong. They then have to add another mistake to change the theory from Special Relativity to General relativity, so as to get the desired agreement vwith experiment.

When the Einstein crowd did the maths for light bending within the context of Newtonian theory, they do the maths wrong again.

So-- the sceanrio is just of doing the maths wrong, not correcting the maths and adding more mistakes to Einstein's theory to get it to work.

While the existing theory pre-Einstein was just misrepresented by the Einstein crowd as they did the maths wrong within that context; and do the maths correctly and "it" still works.

So the History of 20th Century physics is -- make a maths mistake create a new theory that does not quite work, then add another maths mistake to make it work a bit better, then add another maths mistake and so on--- i.e. keep building on maths mistakes.

regards
Roger