I think it’s actually quite a simple model to think of the universe as a network of discrete nodes, rather than a spatial thing that’s expanding and within which various things are accelerating. It makes the Big Bang simpler - we start from a small number of nodes and they grow in number, so we don’t need to think about what the universe is expanding ‘into’. And it explains expansion - nodes can divide like mitosis, so we don’t need to explain some force pushing things apart.