Eventually, when it became apparent that the effort was futile, the standard that corpuscular-mechanistic explanation was required was simply disregarded, and gravitational attraction was accepted as an intrinsic, unexplainable property of matter. The problems of explaining how phlogiston combined with calxes to form particular metals were abandoned when phlogiston itself was abandoned. There simply was no problem to be solved. Relativity explains the contraction, but in a new conceptual framework that does not include the ether. Elements that are preserved may have an entirely different status.
Paradigm shift is a shift in worldview.