"Space is only considered emergent because it can only be defined in terms of what occupies it. What if it is the other way around and what occupies space is expressed in terms that space manifests?"

This amounts to the same. If space is described as quantum fluctuations because it can only be defined in terms of quanta, it is the same as saying that if quanta occupy space, they already must have the properties that space manifests -- which are the quantum properties (and these are pretty well defined and understood as also all the functional technology attests).

"it's a whole lot of energy defined by minimal information. As opposed to all the energy fluctuating across space, including us, that requires a lot of information to describe"

As I elaborated in one of the articles I linked to, the only problem with this is that information-energy-mass equivalence was experimentally demonstrated not only for digital systems but also for e.g. Brownian particles. So information is energy is mass (that is a fact). That does not mean that energy is defined by information etc. Energy is information and mass itself (and all permutations). Thus space is object and objects are (coalesced) space -- simply lumps in the pudding. Well, and you still have to explain where all that pudding comes from and where it resides (but that is beside the point).

Simply, chaos is just another kind of order and order is just another kind of chaos.