So, why the current narrative around ETFs, futures and similar is wrong, I believe:
Start with the idea of Darwinian natural selection. People say "evolution is a theory, it isn't proven", now you may think they're stupid because the theory is proven, but the error is much more fundamental: natural selection is not really a theory at all. It's an inevitable logical consequence of a simple set of conditions: basically, reproduction through encoding along with random variation. Natural selection has to happen in this case.
There is a similar story around the famous "Efficient Market Hypothesis". People love to say that this theory is wrong, in fact I get the impression many think they're very smart for realizing that this is