Speaking of understanding, the Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 light years in diameter, not millions of light years. Even in our own galaxy group which includes the massive Andromeda galaxy is only about 200,000 light years in diameter. Another in our galaxy group is M33 Triangulum Galaxy, and it only has a diameter of about 60,000 light years.
I captured this image of M33 Galaxy just last week. This object has little surface brightness and is not easy to capture. M33 is 3 million light years (18 Trillion Miles) away.

208x60 3hr/28mn
Btw, M33 above appears messed up or not too symmetrical, as it’s speculated M33 collided with Andromeda Galaxy billions of years ago.
That’s not bad at all. I suppose I could see M33 with my 80mm binoculars as a fuzzy dot. It’s 18 quintillion miles, btw. Two really messed up galaxies are the Magellanic clouds, which were once spiral but are now irregular due to their closeness to our own.