The ether was considered to be the physical medium in which light waves propagate, much like air is the medium in which sound waves propagates. The Michelson-Morley experiment (and its successors) proved that it can't be a stationary medium - it would have to move together with the Earth; other experiments had proved that the Earth can't have a very powerful "drag" effect on it either. So, it isn't stationary and it isn't being dragged along with the Earth's movements - almost a contradiction.
Special relativity came along and basically gave an explanation of the workings and movement of light that simply didn't need to make any assumptions about the medium in which light waves propagate. The photoelectric effect, showing that light has a dual nature, either particle or wave, pushed the need for an aether to carry it even lower down. QM probably sealed that completely, with the Schrodinger equation as an explanation of the wave-like nature of fundamental particles.
I really don't think that this interaction between the spin of the Earth and the properties of photons has any true relationship with the notion of an aether. If you wanted to, it would be easier to call the fields in QFT as a kind of aether, I believe they share more properties with the concept.
Experiments show that drag coefficient for light depends on light frequency, but light is not a plain radiowave, it's a Hopfion or a similar thing, so our intuition about its interaction with physical vacuum (ether) can be wrong. Moreover, light is an electromagnetic wave, so it propagates through physical vacuum (ether) because of non-zero capacitance and inductance of the medium. It's possible that light interacts with physical vacuum (ether) only when transitioning from one state to another OR when it is in one of two states, which explains the behavior.
PS.
For example, look at walking droplet. It interacts with the medium through it pilot wave when it bounces off, part of the time, so drag is partial and depends on frequency too.
Special relativity came along and basically gave an explanation of the workings and movement of light that simply didn't need to make any assumptions about the medium in which light waves propagate. The photoelectric effect, showing that light has a dual nature, either particle or wave, pushed the need for an aether to carry it even lower down. QM probably sealed that completely, with the Schrodinger equation as an explanation of the wave-like nature of fundamental particles.
I really don't think that this interaction between the spin of the Earth and the properties of photons has any true relationship with the notion of an aether. If you wanted to, it would be easier to call the fields in QFT as a kind of aether, I believe they share more properties with the concept.