This is nowhere even close to being true. The aether is a notion that has been around in science at least since classical times (when it was not seen as a medium for light to travel through, largely because, back then, light was not generally understood to travel at all), and at various points in its long and complex history was roped in to play a role in the explanation of all sorts of things, very much including gravity. Isaac Newton himself speculated about how short-range repulsive forces between aether particles might be the cause of gravity (in the Queries section of his Optiks, which is about a lot of things besides optics), and before him Descartes and his many scientific followers attempted to explain both the nature of light and gravitational effects in terms of a space-pervading aether. (One should avoid saying that Descartes attempted to explain gravity in this way, since the concept of gravity, as a force of attraction, did not really exist before Newton. However, Descartes did attempt to explain not only why things fall down, but also why the planets move in closed orbits, in terms of the properties of the aether.
Newton himself regarded light as (simplifying quite a lot) a stream of particles, so the aether played no important role in his explanation of it. He thought the aether was real, nonetheless. The aether only became important for explaining light (and, subsequently, other forms of electromagnetic radiation, when they were discovered, and recognized as being akin to light) when wave theory displaced particle theory as the dominant scientific theory of light, I guess the landmark work in this regard being that of Fresnel in the early 19th century.
So yes, I think the OP is right. In broad brush terms, the Higgs field can be said to do some of the same work for modern physicists that the aether did for certain physicists, such as Newton and Descartes (and many other lesser figures), in the past. Actually, the notion of space pervading fields in general (including electromagnetic and gravitational ones) can be said to do much of the same explanatory work in modern science that the notion of a space-pervading aether did for scientists of the past. The main difference is that the aether was usually conceived of as material, and often even particulate, whereas fields are conceived of as being more …er … aetherial.
In fact, it is very frequently the case that obsolete scientific concepts can plausibly be presented in either of two ways, depending on the polemical purposes of the presenter: either as an absurd speculative fantasy that shows how ignorant, uncritical and superstitious our forefathers were, or as an anticipation (by our brilliant ancestors, who were seemingly able, sometimes, to divine the truth without access to most of the relevant evidence) of the true facts that are grasped in a more accurate and nuanced, but not fundamentally different, way by modern science (and sometimes, but not always, under a different terminology). Both of these ways of presenting the matter, however, tend to involve serious distortions of the historical realities (although the first generally more so, in my opinion).
