As a general principle I would advise a grain of salt whenever a physicist claims to have solved an outstanding astrophysical problem. Verlinde is a great physicist --- I remember reading Verlinde's paper on entropic gravity when it came out and I'm still excited about that idea. But someone with a background in pure physics often lacks the background in astronomy to know whether their ideas will work. (I remember hearing a visiting physicist present his ideas about stars producing axions, and having an astronomy professor point out that if he was right, Cepheid variables would not pulsate at the observed frequencies.)
The article mentions the Bullet Cluster as one observation that MOND has difficulty explaining. Another observation that I'm not sure how MOND would explain is the dramatic difference in dynamics between a globular cluster and a dwarf spheroidal galaxy. Globular clusters are observed to have virtually no dark matter, whereas some dwarf spheroidal galaxies have somewhere between 1000 to 10,000 times as much dark matter as ordinary matter [1]. These two kinds of objects have comparable numbers of stars and are roughly the same size (though dwarf spheroidals are admittedly larger by about an order of magnitude). This discrepancy can be explained with cold WIMPs [2], but it's hard to understand how some MOND-like process would produce such incredibly different dynamics between the two kinds of galaxies.
I'll admit that I have not looked very carefully at Verlinde's paper. But the evidence for dark matter is much more than galaxy rotation curves these days. A credible alternative to WIMPs has to explain more than that.
All that aside, from a theoretical perspective the work is very interesting because it provides a much-needed framework to understand why something like MOND could exist. But I don't think that any of the direct detection experiments should pack it in quite yet.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.03856
[2]: Well, sort of. Galaxy formation is still a big open problem, and globular cluster formation is probably even less well understood. But with WIMP dark matter it's very plausible that different formation mechanisms would produce objects with different amounts of dark matter.
The article mentions the Bullet Cluster as one observation that MOND has difficulty explaining. Another observation that I'm not sure how MOND would explain is the dramatic difference in dynamics between a globular cluster and a dwarf spheroidal galaxy. Globular clusters are observed to have virtually no dark matter, whereas some dwarf spheroidal galaxies have somewhere between 1000 to 10,000 times as much dark matter as ordinary matter [1]. These two kinds of objects have comparable numbers of stars and are roughly the same size (though dwarf spheroidals are admittedly larger by about an order of magnitude). This discrepancy can be explained with cold WIMPs [2], but it's hard to understand how some MOND-like process would produce such incredibly different dynamics between the two kinds of galaxies.
I'll admit that I have not looked very carefully at Verlinde's paper. But the evidence for dark matter is much more than galaxy rotation curves these days. A credible alternative to WIMPs has to explain more than that.
All that aside, from a theoretical perspective the work is very interesting because it provides a much-needed framework to understand why something like MOND could exist. But I don't think that any of the direct detection experiments should pack it in quite yet.
[1]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.03856
[2]: Well, sort of. Galaxy formation is still a big open problem, and globular cluster formation is probably even less well understood. But with WIMP dark matter it's very plausible that different formation mechanisms would produce objects with different amounts of dark matter.