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We don't have enough evidence to say that it's either proved or disproved[*]. It's as valid a field of study, both as mathematical physics and experimental physics, as anything else was in physics 100-150 years ago. When amazing strides foward were made. I'm very dark-matter-skeptic, but I recognise that if pure mathematical physics makes a prediction that agrees with a result that a completely independent group of experimental physicists measured then there's something worth further study. Add to that otherwise-inexplicable lensing, and otherwise-inexplicable rotation curves, and not only do you have a theoretical transparency-time snapshot of theoretical existence, but right-here-right-now evidence for something that has the same properties. That's defnitely grounds for further scientific study. And if that's like Michelson and Morley's demonstration of the existence of the aether - a nice healthy disproof (until negated by LIGO), then great, that's science moving forward. Anyone who looks at the "science of the gaps" (as per "god of the gaps") and says "don't do science on it" rather than "do more science on it" is not scientifically minded, they're irrational.

[* Can we say we've proved protons exist? Now we know they're just tightly bound bags of quarks, don't we have to admit that "proton" is just shorthand for a particular arrangement of other things - the things that actually exist (to the best of our models). There's no "proton" field, for example (and although there never was in those terms, our views from 70 years ago were expressible in quite similar terms (e.g. conservation of baryon number)), so there's no *thing* /the proton/.]