One interesting thing to come out of theoretical physics in the last 30+ years, but only formulated in the last 10 or so is something called the "holographic principle". There are several alternative (and vague) formulations. It is not known which one, if any, will be ultimately correct ["ultimately" meaning: correct in a hypothetical theory of quantum gravity].

One of the forms of the principle is that the entire quantum state space of a region of space maps to the quantum state space of its boundary. This is suggested by Hawking's blackhole radiation theory and the identification of thermodynamical entropy with the area of the event horizon. Area would be a measure of the size of the state space of the boundary (and of the unobserved interior). Identifying thermodynamic entropy with information entropy one arrives at an identification of geometric area with information entropy. Geometry is information!

This is very similar to the classical (not quantum) Euler-Lagrange variational principle works. One specifies an "action" functional which is supposed to be extremal given boundary conditions. In this case the space of bulk solutions can be identified with the space of (valid) boundary conditions. The duality between the two corresponds to Lagrangian vs. Hamiltonian mechanics. The connection with Quantum mechanics comes from Dirac's insight (formulated rigorously by Feynman) that the minimum action principle is the saddle-point approximation of the phase of the quantum amplitude in the path integral formulation. But the holographic principle is not the same thing as the Euler-Lagrange principle, or at least nobody has been able to get anything useful out of the idea that they are the same.

Another bold idea that the universe can be arbitrarily divided into two parts by a boundary, and that the holographic states on the boundary describe the two parts of the universe on either side, and their interactions. The boldness comes from imagining that somehow combining this with the holographic principle and the identification of area with information entropy will result in a theory of quantum gravity.

This is all very exciting but it is not physics. It's physicists thrashing about in confusion because of the lack of experimental guidance.

Finally, since you talk about spacetime emerging, I'll quote a comment I wrote a week ago:

quantum mechanics presupposes the existence of Newtonian time.

Quantum field theory pressupposes the existence of Einsteinian spacetime. You can get away with quantum field theory on stationary spacetimes because there you have a proxy for "Newtonian time". String theory is not very different in the way it appears to require a highly symmetric "background".

But things like Hawking radiation are like the "old" quantum mechanics of Bohr and Sommerfeld. There needs to be a better theory. One in which somehow spacetime emerges.