The most powerful intuition motivating realism is an old idea, commonly referred to in recent discussions as the “miracle argument” or “no miracles argument”, after Putnam’s (1975a: 73) claim that realism “is the only philosophy that doesn’t make the success of science a miracle”. The argument begins with the widely accepted premise that our best theories are extraordinarily successful: they facilitate empirical predictions, retrodictions, and explanations of the subject matters of scientific investigation, often marked by astounding accuracy and intricate causal manipulations of the relevant phenomena. What explains this success? One explanation, favored by realists, is that our best theories are true (or approximately true, or correctly describe a mind-independent world of entities, laws, etc.). Indeed, if these theories were far from the truth, so the argument goes, the fact that they are so successful would be miraculous.
The SEP goes on to mention arguments against and counter arguments to that. What is its current status? I have studied this, a few decades ago, and I recall the most robust wording of it being that the success of novel empirical predictions needs a realist explanation. Does that withstand the criticisms mentioned in the article? If so, what about technological succesess, which are prima facie a lot more amazing that the fact there is a new particle that may not really exist?
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/#MiraArgu