They carry energy, interact ... and are completely legitimate objects.
Forces are really better understood as tendency of the field toward having minimal energy.
Fields are no less ‘real’ than material particles ...
... and we will see that they are (way) ‘more real.’
It takes a certain shift in thinking : there are no forces ‘simply acting’ (at a distance).
Interactions are “local” – transmitted from a point to a point of a field.