The universe appears "old", but it is still less than 10,000 years old

[Zen Badger]

I understand all of that.
But that is simply a case of perception. It's doesn't mean that it is what is actually happening.
And it doesn't mean that the light from Andromeda got here instantly.
It still took it 2.2 million years to complete the journey, no matter how we wish to view it.

There is no concept of "what is actually happening" with any grounding in evidence beyond what is expressed by our scientific models. It seems to me like you desperately want to remain in a baroque era intuition of reality onto which all the new stuff is just grafted on, but with an actual absolute space and time and deterministic reality lurking beneath Relativity and Quantum Theory. That's not how it is, if you want to say "it took 2.2 million years", you have to put a little imaginary footnote which specifies within which theoretical framework and for which observer this statement is to be interpreted. This is already the case without nonisotropic synchronization nonsense: in general relativity, someone sitting on the surface of jupiter will measure a different time passing than someone floating in space. This difference will be rather minuscule, but that's not the point.

Hmmm, let me try this another way.

Light speed in not instantaneous.

Are we agreed on that point?