Thank you for writing about this. I have been writing how Spacetime is just a tool for a real long time. It appears to seep in but you are not addressing it correctly still.

Space and Time are phenomena. It means they are real but they do not have attributes of their own. Somehow, the physicist brains cannot apply this simple task. Fascinating.

Here is an article in which the two ingredients to explain the behavior of matter are Gravity and what I call the Fourth Motion. It is truly similar to Spacetime but slightly better because it is about the actual mechanical parts.

https://medium.com/@fred-rick/the-fourth-motion-of-matter-393718a67fdf