“he also agreed with you that space itself is not a physical thing that could be warped or compressed.”
No he didn’t.
Yes, he most certainly did. I believe he stated it in one of his New York Times articles, which they like to lock up behind a paywall, but I’ll try to find a link to it for you when I get a chance.
You may be confused because of course he talks about “length contraction”, but there is a very good reason that although he called the correlating effect “time dilation”, he did not use the term “space contraction”, but rather “length contraction” instead. That was a very deliberate choice on Einstein’s part.
------No he didn’t.
Well considering it was all at one time smaller than a BB wouldn't that be compressed and what it is now, be expanded? Where was space then since it wasn't needed?