It seems to me the only thing that could "pre-exist" the Creation is God the Creator Himself. There is absolutely no evidence to the contrary.
Personally, I'm with Alamo-Girl: Nothing preceded the Creation but God and the Ayn Sof. The Ayn Sof is certainly not "chaos." Rightly or wrongly, I interpret that term as meaning the "nothing," which describes the "state" (for lack of a better word) of the living God alone, utterly outside of time and space which did not then exist. That is, not alone in the universe; for He hadn't created it yet. One can barely imagine/think about such a situation, so totally removed as it is from ordinary human experience.
Chaos implies and evokes its opposite number, order. But neither order nor its opposite existed before God made the world, the universe.
Perhaps my friend kosta50 would say there is no direct evidence for my view. But it seems to me there is a lot of indirect evidence.
For one thing, things don't create themselves. There is nothing in nature that we can perceive as sui generis. Everything we observe as existing has a cause outside of itself.
MHGinTN, you point to the source of the confusion: our insufficient idea of the nature of time. Humans are "condemned" to do their observing of the natural world in terms of four-dimensional space-time — three dimensions of space, one of time. The really hardcore materialists/determinists out there imagine time is merely the "result" of natural processes occurring in three-dimensional space. Thus time is imagined as an irreversible linear process inexorably moving from past, present, to future, that is "created" by the sequence of spatial events. It has no other reality than to be the cumulative product of the sequence of spatial cause-effect relations in nature.
It took Einstein to inform us that time is an independent dimension in itself, not just the result of natural cause-effect events. On the Einsteinian view, time is itself a bona-fide, non-spatial dimension which, when married to the spatial dimensions, produces the construct of spacetime. Yet on this view, time is still essentially linear, irreversibly moving along the line of past, to present, to future.
And yet some physicists now say that the natural world reifies or reflects events taking place in another, "higher" (non-linear) temporal dimension inaccessible to direct observation altogether. Your name for this is "volumetric time." That is, non-linear time. That is, an idea of spacetime as involving additional temporal dimension(s) not readily visible to or easily conceivable by human observers.
To me, it's like our 4D spatiotemporal block is enfolded in an additional temporal dimension or dimensions. We don't "see" it (them) directly. But we need them, if we want to understand the way the world that God made actually is.
You said, "I don't agree that there was an actual state of chaos, from The Creator's perspective," and I think that is true. The reason being God is not ensnared in the 4D block of normal human experience, while chaos has no meaning outside of it. Not only is He outside of time altogether, but His Creation involves more than the 4D block. Momenta at higher temporal dimensions "distill" and find expression in that 4D block.
That is to say, neither divine reality, nor the natural world most importantly including the Creation, can be entirely reduced to three dimensions of space and one of time. To me, that is an incredible expectation.
I thank you so very much for your work in this area, dear MHGinTN. (And I hope I'm understanding you correctly!)
And thank you ever so much for your outstanding, thought-provocative essay/post!
You are so kind to acknowledge my ramblings. May I additionally point out/repeat that all expressions of spatio-temporal reality are created by the Creator, and we have some very interesting hints on other where/when realms not directly accessible to our sensing, like the enigmatic scene in Daniel Chapter Five, and the astonishing exit from the burial wrappings without unwrapping them and the rock tomb without rolling away the stone blocking the 4D entrance/exit.