It's complicated. Helium does make the list, but lithium doesn't. Carbon and oxygen are higher than you'd expect if you're just going by atomic weight.

I remember from my astrophysics course that Lithium was formed in the aftermath of the Big Bang. I would imagine that interstellar space is full of Hydrogen, Helium and Lithium.

I can imagine that stable nuclei such as carbon or iron would form as a result of stellar fusion but I would be hard pressed to imagine that these outmass the more primordial elements. I would be interested to see references if you have any.

Wikipedia has a good writeup: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem...

TL;DR: Stars burn it up.

That table is for the milky way though, not the universe.

Yeah but all the elemental matter in the universe is like three dust specks floating in a lecture hall. You can ask about the dust specks or the lecture hall interchangeably.

This is a common misconception. Intergalactic space is filled with about half of the matter in the universe. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warm–hot_intergalactic_mediu...

As to your original point though, there doesn’t appear to be too many elements here apart from ionized hydrogen and hydrogen.

Great point. I almost missed this. It really seems like there should be another separation in the article I linked, between "Universe" and "Milky Way."