I’m not sure if I worded my question correctly, but let me try to explain more.
If we use a giant telescope to look at another planet 10 light years away from us, we would be looking at how it was 10 years ago. The thing I don’t understand is how does light store and also transfer all the information about that planet (or all the “data” that ends up in our eyes) and yet it’s still the fastest thing.
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> how does light store and also transfer all the information
“Information” isn’t really a “thing” in the sense you seem to be imagining it. Instead information is conveyed through changes or differences in something, like a light changing frequency or intensity. That doesn’t really have anything to do with how quickly the light can travel.
Think about if I have a sheet of paper which can either be red or green. If the sheet is red it means “stop”, if it is green it means “go”. The paper can only have two states so it can only convey a small amount of information, but it doesn’t matter how large or small the piece of paper is. Even if I made the paper enormous, like 20 tons of paper, it doesn’t store and transfer any more information than if it was a fleck you could barely see. What would make the paper contain more information is if I divided it up into a bunch of sections each of which could be various colors to signify various things. The number of states the paper can be in vastly increases and it can contain more information despite being of similar size to the single-color piece of paper.
The same concepts apply to light. With data transfer on Earth through fiber-optics it usually comes down to how many frequencies of light you can monitor and how quickly the signal can be changed. In that sense the speed of light is a benefit because if I flip a light on and off a billion times a second it moves quickly enough to be able to distinguish the difference, as if it was slow like sound one signal wouldn’t have time to leave before the second signal was attempted to be transmitted.
In the case of light from distant stars or planets it is usually the combination of the entire spectrum of light that tells us a lot about the objects viewed. The number of different states that the spectrum of light can be in has nothing to do with how quickly it can travel.
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