There is no reason to think that "infinity" will be essential to describing the universe any more than any other possible abstraction that we have not so far constructed.
Why not? An infinitely large universe goes against our intuitions, but our intuitions were formed by the experience of living on a finite planet and have no bearing on what's true on a galactic scale – just like they have no bearing on what's true at the quantum scale. There is no objective reason to assume that the universe isn't infinite.
The observable universe is growing much faster than that, because space itself is expanding.
e.g. time and space likely aren't quantized, you have an infinite amount of points in between any two arbitrary points in spacetime. don't mention planck scale black holes, it's a meme and even most phycisists who like to cite it haven't actually thought about it for more than 5 minutes.
E.g. the observable universe is finite. Its observable age is finite. The number of known elementary particle types is finite. The number of particles within the observable universe is finite (according to the current understanding). Etc.
There are many examples.
Do we disagree on this, or am I perhaps misunderstanding your position here?