Isn’t the universe mostly vacuum?
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Way back when that phrase came about with the Greeks we had just started thinking the earth was round, but also still believed that the stars and planets were mounted up there on spheres of water air and fire.
So we didn’t know about atmospheric pressure really. The force that resulted in a created vacuum disappearing was just thought of as elements rushing to fill the vacuum because they wanted to. We didn’t even come up with bouyancy until about a hundred years after that.
The idea that space was a vacuum didn’t really even come about till like 1800 ish years later when someone got a proper barometer and realized that air pressure tended to decrease with altitude.
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