Comment by svachalek
As a non-physicist, my understanding is that they actually exist, but can't be thought of as flying around like ping pong balls. I think it's one of those things that comes down to interpretation though, where the math is very clear but how you think of what it "means" lies beyond science.
Went on a slight rabbit hole reading after posting this and seems like we're all just excitations in a stack of quantum fields :-D