Rather, it feels like gravity is special and the chunks of spacetime themselves are carrying information about the gravitational field.

My imagination is odd because it's based on how I would write a distributed game server. (It doesn't make sense to simulate gravity pairs between every single pair of particles. This isn't just slow, it doesn't scale if the universe expands. But it makes sense to precalculate gravity field as a chunked map and then update one chunk at a time.) (You can ask the same about light/EM but light hits only some of the things and can cause complex local interactions at the scale of electron orbits. When gravity changes, it's very macroscopic instead. So I wanted to treat them differently)