I think it would be more helpful if people referred to these as metaphors for the atonement instead of theories. All of them are using different vehicles drawn from our embodied human experiences to understand a very abstract spiritual reality we have no comparable experience with. All metaphors have limits. Many metaphors taken together give us a fuller picture of this abstract reality, but none of them are going to work like a scientific model and explain how atonement “works.”
Personally, the metaphor of a substitutionary sacrifice illuminates aspects of the atonement that other metaphors don’t, so I think it has its uses. It’s when you treat a metaphor as a mechanistic explanation that answers all questions that you get into trouble. Metaphors always leave some things not made explicit and open to imagination.
Jesus spends his time talking about the coming Kingdom not explaining the atonement. All his references are pretty oblique.
To give his life as a ransom for many
Greater love has no one than laying down one’s life for a friend
You will destroy this temple but I will build it again in three days
John says, “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” This evokes the Jewish sacrificial system in which animals were substitutionary sacrifices and sacrifices were pictured by the community as necessary to avoid judgment and wrath. I don’t think you can get away with a claim that the idea that Jesus is a substitutionary sacrifice that takes a punishment meant for others is made up out of nothing in the 21st century. The idea clearly has a history in the Old Testament law. However I would argue that that Jewish sacrificial system was a metaphor and the link of Jesus death to the Jewish sacrificial system is another metaphor. They need to be understood as metaphors.