Agreed, I find lots of these "what is the universe?" questions fall apart, due to the fact that humans aren't great at figuring out what we don't know. Just a thousand years ago, our smartest minds had a very different idea of what "space" was, how our solar system behaved, and even the shape of our planet, but it made sense to them at the time with the technology they had, so it's hard to mock them.
For us to theorize that which we cannot hope to ever understand makes us no different.
I generally agree, though one small caveat - the shape and even size of the Earth was pretty well known to scholars since ancient times, at least since the 3rd century BCE, both in the Hellenistic world and in India.
For us to theorize that which we cannot hope to ever understand makes us no different.