I just don't think that makes any sense whatsoever. How is it that things can pop into existence from nothing, that is the hypothesis and disproving it is on us?

I linked it somewhere, but it wasn't this chain.

https://scienceandnonduality.com/article/quantum-prediction-something-is-created-from-nothing/

To me it is a bigger leap to assume time and space came into existence from nothing suddenly.

It's a bigger leap to consider that space-time came into existence for no reason than that an intelligence that exists outside of that created it? Where did they come from? They must have come from either nothing (which seems more crazy than a random thing like space-time that is not organized), or something created them, which only pushes the question to what created that thing.

It doesn't simplify it. It only makes it more complicated. The universe just starting at some point is incredibly simple, though fairly crazy to consider since we're space-time beings that did not evolve to consider a lack of space-time. We can't imagine four dimensions easily, let alone zero dimensions. (tangent: zero took a long time to develop, because the concept of nothing is so hard to even hold in our minds.)

The universe just appearing/starting is the simplest answer. The other two answers I can think of is that it always existed (in which case, how can it exist for infinite time; that's as hard to consider as it just starting at zero) or something created it, which then just begs the question: who created them, ad infinitum. Occam's razor applies and says the most likely (though not necessarily correct) answer is the simplest.

We can't prove any of this obviously. It's, I think, literally impossible to prove, and certainly we're incapable of testing it with existing capabilities. Its a philosophical discussion, not a scientific one.