Consider, how is your current discomfort with this statement any different from the discomfort felt through the centuries when ideas like fields instead of forces, entropy, phase spaces, quantum amplitudes / complex numbers, matrix mechanics, spacetime, curvature, etc were being introduced. They are all abstractions that end up being more reliable than our intuition.
Whether this "abstraction" is a "real thing" is a question for the philosophers. For me there is no difference between the two.
Quantum spin is one that gets me, or the uncertainty principle. It makes me very uneasy, but whether or not I'm comfortable is irrelevant. Those are to the best of our knowledge actual features of the universe.
Abstractions aren't really in the language of the pure sciences. Analogies, metaphors, etc can all serve to help explain but the speed of the propagation of information in this universe is very much defined as the velocity of light in a vacuum in a completely literal sense. There's no abstraction here. Maybe some confusion about what we mean by 'information' but I'm sure there are better resources if you want an afternoon rabbit hole.