Is conventional flow a real, physical thing or is it something we made up?

Is conventional flow a real, physical thing or is it something we still use for historical reasons?

It's a model we use to describe flow of charge. "All models are flawed but some are useful" - and this one is very useful.

Electron flow is the actual current flow and the textbooks are the other way because of benjamin franklin ...

It is true that the mobile charges in metals are electrons but it is not always the case. In other situations the mobile charges are positive ions.

Don't get hung up on this. You don't need to think about electrons for most electronic engineering. Just volts, amperes, watts, ohms, henries and farads will get you a long way.

Give Benjamin some capital letters - even if you think he got it backwards.

The important concept is that current is the net flow of charges across some boundary. This is the basic physics of current. This is what you should remember.

Current flow is inherently directional. Early scientists could have defined the positive direction to be the other way, so that electron flow is the positive current flow direction. But they didn't. It is not a big deal. All the mathematics works just fine the way it is. It is not some tragic mistake. It does not mean that current is imaginary or made up.

Current also has a magnitude. The number of charges per second passing through the boundary. One coulomb of charge per second is one ampere (aka, 1 amp).

To sum up, current flow is very real. The magnitude is measured in coulombs per second (amperes) and by convention, the positive direction of current flow is opposite to the electron flow.

"Current" may be the flow of physical positive charge (protons or positive ions, for example) in one direction or physical negative charge in the other direction. It doesn't matter whether how we define "conventional current" as long as we are consistent.