Likely it is too early to say. There must have been some aspects of caloric theory that gave it an aura of plausibility. Unfortunately, a 1971 book by Robert Fox, The Caloric Theory of Gases from Lavoisier to Regnault, which might help illuminate the question is out of print and rare as a used book. Suppose (as one may reasonably suspect.) that dark energy is the wrong way of looking at things. So was caloric fluid as the basis for a theory of heat the wrong way of looking at things, though successful for a while. Will epistemology find parallels in the future between caloric and dark energy? I suspect yes. What do you think?
History of physics is totally different from physics. Dark energy has to do with spacetime; caloric energy doesn't. The molecular and atomic structure of gases and their thermodynamics was understood in the beginning of the 20th century by Boltzmann and Einstein, essentially. Caloric energy just represents what people didn't understand about the subject before them.
Dark energy, incidentally, can be perfectly well described by the cosmological constant, which is as much a feature of general relativity as Newton's constant.
https://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo13179781.html
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/2058-7058/23/01/33
[Available at https://physicsworld.com/a/dark-energy-how-the-paradigm-shifted]
Hypothesizing a special "fluid" to explain physical/chemical phenomena seems to be a standard meta-scientific strategy. The "ether" is another example.
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