Slight deviation from the thread's theme, but...
The definition of the "ether" is often nebulous at best, if not downright drifting into the realm of "magic smoke". So don't feel bad. I grappled with the concept as well

.
But to add to your concept, RF wave propagation (of any type) is also affected, to a greater and lesser degree, by solar "winds", as they exist
outside of the Earth's atmosphere. A pretty comprehensive piece on the subject can be found here:
https://deepspace.jpl.nasa.gov/dsndocs/810-005/106/106B.pdf
Back on how electronics was taught, and a big deviation from thread:
In the 1950s and early 1960s you knew where you were. The main active device was a valve (tube). Effectively, it only had three terminals: cathode, grid, and anode. The anode was pretty much always positive with respect to the cathode and the grid was normally a bit negative with respect to the cathode.
Electrons flowed from the hot cathode to the anode and the number of electrons flowing was controlled by the grid/cathode voltage: the more negative the grid was with respect to the cathode the less anode current flowed. The grid was an infinite impedance so no grid current flowed. OK, you had to use your imagination a bit to sort out the electron flow/conventional flow cock-up so that you had to assume that current flowed from the positive rail into the anode but you soon came to terms with that. I knew most of this when I was about 12. By the age of 14, I also knew that the voltage gain of a valve was gm * RA (mutual conductance times anode load). By age 17, I had some idea about the Miller feedback capacitor, between the anode and grid. And that was pretty much a valve's characteristics in a nut-shell. Armed with that basic information it was not too difficult to understand a valve operating in common cathode, common anode (cathode follower), and common grid (cascode) configurations.
Then these funny transistor things came on the scene. For a start there was PNP types and also the very rare NPN types. Then there was holes and electrons flowing in the transistor. Then there was leakage current and this terrible thing called thermal run-away. There was also the view, probably quite rightly in the early days, that transistors were not reliable and would blow at the slightest provocation, especially if they got warm, so only girls used transistors- men on the other hand used valves.
In any electronics community there was always someone who knew about transistors, there was a similar situation with binary arithmetic and computer programming at one time. These people had the mantra of a shaman in a Red Indian tribe. They were also mysterious and kept their secrets to themselves.
It was in this atmosphere that I tried to learn about semiconductor diodes and transistors. I read book after book, but just could not get it. Soon I came to the conclusion that semiconductors were just too complicated for me and perhaps so for the whole of electronics- we had just started learning about AC circuits with capacitors and inductors and phasor diagrams and all that kind of stuff and the whole thing was a bit overwhelming. Then they hit us with j (square root of minus one) and that did it for me. For about a month I thought seriously of going into another line of business. But the AC stuff started to gel and soon became second nature with a bit of practice. The big breakthrough was learning the formula: one, over, two pi root LC equals the resonant frequency. One of our group was an ace musician, pianist, and singer and he even wrote a song with that line. The rhyme continued through the song.
The big day came; we were going to have our first lesson on semiconductors from the expert in the field. I couldn't wait. The lecturer kicked off with a long description about crystal structures, minority and majority carriers, valency co-valent bonds, doping, leakage current, and, of course, the much feared thermal run away. That took the first couple of lessons. Then we moved on to the operation of a diode with more physics and a load of exponential equations involving Boltzmans constant and degrees Kelvin. It seemed that leakage current flowed one way and that normal current flowed the other way. By now, I decided that I would never understand how a semiconductor diode worked, even though I knew how a thermionic diode worked. The next week we were going to cover the operation of a transistors. I thought perhaps I will get on better with that.
On Monday morning, when we went in the class room, the instructor had already put a model of a transistor on the blackboard- I just could not make head nor tail of it. I know now that he had drawn an h parameter model of a transistor in the grounded base configuration, complete with re, rb, and rc. Off he went with blackboard after blackboard of formula. I realized then that I would never understand semiconductors and that is how it stayed. In our theory exams about 10% of the mark was allocated to semiconductors and the whole class decided that they would just forget about semiconductors and take the 10% hit. I did try to get a simple explanation of how a transistor worked from the instructor. He was most helpful. Once again he drew a grounded base configuration on the blackboard and than explained that a transistor has current gain. The input current into the emitter is Ib + Ic and the output current is Ic. He said that typically a transistor had a current gain of 0.95. I said that is not a gain that is a loss. He said that the gain was realized because the collector resistance is very high, in the order of 30K Ohms. That did it for me. Like all of us, I learned by rote a lot of standard questions and answers about semiconductors, sufficient to get exam marks, but did not have a clue about how semiconductors worked.
It wasn't until four years later, when I was in a design and development environment, that I got the hang of it all. An engineer explained, in about half an hour, how a semiconductor diode and a transistor worked in practical terms. Also, the common base transistor configuration was rarely used in real world circuits, mainly common emitter, similar to a valve, and common collector, emitter follower or cathode follower.
This is what I learnt:
Diode
If the anode is positive with respect to the cathode current will flow and there will be a forward drop of around 200mV for a germanium diode and 600mV for a silicon diode.
If the anode is negative with respect to the cathode no current will flow, except a very small leakage current of perhaps 1uA to 10uA for a germanium diode or 10nA to 100nA for a silicon diode.
Transistor
The base/emitter junction of a transistor is a diode with the same characteristics. The base current will be amplified by the hFE (Beta or current gain) of the transistor, so that the collector current will be IB * hFE and the emitter current will be, IB + (IB *hFE).
Armed with that simple information it was possible to design a whole raft of circuits, and once that basic information was assimilated, it was a progressive and simple matter to learn about the three transistor configurations: common emitter, common collector, and common base. It was even relatively easy to learn the h parameters and, more importantly, to understand their significance.
I realise now that our instructor, in spite of his expert reputation, did nor know a thing about designing a transistor circuit and probably didn't really know how a transistor functioned. Worse still, he did not know how to teach.