It's an interesting question but one I feel is incomplete without understanding Kuhnian incommensurability, i.e. that concepts and the language which describes them do not change at the same rate.

So the big debate was between Antoine Lavoisier and Joseph Priestly in the 1770s to 1780s.

Priestly was a supporter of Phlogiston. He thought that phlogiston was what burnt and was absorbed into the air. So instead of the current understanding that fire feeds off oxygen in air until it runs out of oxygen, Phlogiston theory was that the air absorbs Phlogiston from the fire until it can make no more and the fire starves.

It's great point in favour was it was a way of explaining the demonstrated link between air and fire.

And when Priestly and Joseph Black discovered nitrogen and oxygen they fit those elements into that theory so oxygen was air which still was empty and could take more Phlogiston and nitrogen/co2 was air full of Phlogiston which could no longer burn. In actuality it was deoxynated air with the air converted to co2 by the fire.

And plants, which convert co2 into oxygen, were seen as then reabsorbing the Phlogiston from the air.

So essentially Phlogiston theory was a step in the right direction, they just got the details wrong.

Which gets back to Kuhnian incommensurability. Gravity as a term dates back to the 1620s and we say that newton was right about gravity. But what we understand to be gravity now is very different, we just kept the name.

Or we say Galileo was right because he was less wrong than some previous people even though he posited the sun being the centre of the universe, orbits being perfectly circular and stars fixed in place. We improved and corrected his theories but didn't change the name.

Or Darwin. Our current theory on evolution is different to Darwin's original one but we kept the name so it seems like he was right.

That could have happened to Phlogiston. Phlogiston can roughly stands in for carbon and it works. Phlogisticated air is carbon dioxide and dephlogisticated air is oxygen. You have to alter the details but the word could have been reused like gravity was.

It wasn't because Antoine Lavoisier, who was writing at the time, opposed the theory and he discredited it rather than modified it because he was disagreeing with priestly and his followers in real time.

Now Lavoisier was a brilliant man, who worked out conversation of mass and oxidation and that there must be two elemnts in the air, oxygen and nitrogen, one which burned and one which did not. But he was equally wrong about what oxygen was, oxygen means "acid former" because Lavoisier thought oxygen was the constituent of all acids, which it isn't and he thought it was an abstract principle, never identifying it with a specific element with weight and other defined properties.

So it's not so much that phlogiston was untrue and oxygen was true. It's that the latter theory was adapted and changed and the former theory was thrown out. The current understanding is hugely different to what anyone in the 1780s, on either side, posited.