Tolman surface brightness test now looks much brighter. ;-)
Can we discuss something easier?
Why you think that photon is immortal? Why we have rule of right hand in EM? Why we see star formations older than BB? WTF is "physical vacuum"? What is waved by gravitational waves? What is happen in linear Sagnac interferometer? How photon is formed (it requires FTL to form)? What happens in double slit experiment? And so on.
Nothing is hidden, but it does take time and persistence.
Photons are not "immortal" they can decay if they have enough energy. Rule of right hand is a convention, could be left hand if you define the sign of charge differently. We don't see star formation older than BB but early universe physics is not easy to understand and there are lots of model uncertainties. Physical vacuum is what remains when no excitations are present. Gravitational waves are ripples in space itself. I don't understand what you mean by photons being formed.
You can not expect the concepts and intuitions that you formed by interacting with the macroscopic world to serve you well when thinking about the microscopic and fundamental. People used to think that you need some type of material aether that carries the waves of light. But that turned out not to be concepts that map well to reality. It took decades to learn to unthink these concepts, there is no shortcut to doing so yourself.
TLT predicts that value of "Speed of expanse" will be different when measured using different methods or frequencies, and it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble%27s_law#Measured_values... .
TLT predicts that there is much more stars, but we cannot see them yet because they are too dim, but more powerful telescopes will be able to pickup them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolman_surface_brightness_test https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/hubble-reveals-obs...
TTL predicts stars and galaxies older than BB (because of no BB), and they are found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_distant_astro...
TTL predicts that Cosmic Background Radiation is just radiation of distant objects with Z=1000 .
And so on.
In short, mainstream theories doesn't hold against new data.