This is precisely why I think people shouldn't reify mathematical entities, like spacetime being a literal fabric that "expands" or "curves." When we say space expands we just mean that things that are traveling in a straight line will have their paths curve away from one another. You can imagine two people in a space ship flying next to each other and neither one of them places any pressure on their pilot joystick to turn the space ship, yet over time they find that their paths diverge from each other anyways. This creates a tendency for everything to move away from everything else.

When Einstein first introduced his theory of gravity, it was clear that gravity causes straight lines to curve towards each other, and if you add up all the localized effects of gravity, on a universal scale, the whole universe would on average eventually come together and collapse.

It was believed at the time that the universe is eternally static, so he found a free parameter in theory called the cosmological constant that creates a universal positive curvature (making paths diverge) which if set to just the right value could balance out the totality of the local negative curvatures (making things converge) and give you a static universe.

However, when physicists actually measured the cosmological constant (it's a free parameter like G, you have to measure it) it turns out to be way larger than is necessary just for a static universe.