What you seem to be trying to remember is that certain types of extragalactic supernovae produce a tremendous number of neutrinos, and those can be detected on Earth before the associated light does. The reason is that both are produced deep within the dying star, and while the star's outer layers are largely transparent to the neutrinos (not completely: it's neutrino pressure that makes the star explode[1]), the deep-in-the-star supernova photons bounce around inside. That's very much not empty space.
https://www.astronomy.com/science/in-a-supernova-why-do-we-d...
We can detect type SN1a supernovae out to about z=4 (redshift of about four in light-years is about twelve billion years of light travel time from the supernova to us). That's not really enough for the delayed pulse of light to catch up to the neutrinos produced also produced in the dying star's interior at the same time. Also, not all of the emitted photons are likely to scatter off gas and dust in any interstellar medium along the way, so the relative delay at Earth of the bright electromagnetic flash is dominated by the dying star's outer layers.
(There are more complicated electromagnetic signals like light echos <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Light_echo> that can follow on much later; there aren't any neutrino equivalents really).
> photons aren't affected by gravity directly because massless but their path, their limit of causality, is affected
Not sure what you are trying to say here, but photons certainly both feel and source spacetime curvature. In empty space, photons always travel along null geodesics. The distribution of all matter, energy and momentum, the expanding background of inter-galaxy-cluster space, and the collapsing background of galaxy clusters (and galaxies, and components of galaxies like their central black holes and stars) picks out what geodesics fill spacetime. Some are null, and massless things can find themselves on ("couple to") them. Some are timelike, and massive things can find themselves on them.
Geodesics are free-fall trajectories, so are inertial as in "things in motion tend to stay in motion", and barring any further accelerations a photon coupled to a null geodesic will stay on that null geodesic and a neutrino coupled to a timelike geodesic will stay on that timelike geodesic.
Some neutrinos and photons start on parallel geodesics within the supernova's exploding core. Each neutrino stays coupled to its timelike geodesic all the way to detection on Earth. The photons are all forced off their initial null geodesic by mostly scattering off nuclear matter near the star's core, find themselves on a second null geodesic, more nuclear scattering, possibly some scattering off ions in outer layers, and each ultimately might end up on a geodesic that it stays on until it reaches Earth.
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[1] on neutrinos driving the explosions and how alot of them stick around as they are captured into heavier chemical elements and isotopes https://www.mpg.de/11368641/neutrinos-supernovae