Space bending is a general relativity thing, which isn’t really related much to how mirrors work.

Regarding the medium bit, photons being absorbed and remitted can’t explain how light moves slower in glass. This is just an extremely popular myth. Photons are only absorbed by atoms at very specific frequencies. Also, the entire reason glass is transparent to begin with is that it’s not absorbing the photons (requires too much energy to bump the electron’s energy level so the photon isn’t absorbed and it keeps on trucking). Also photon absorption and remission is stochastic so there’s no way to control the direction it happens in or how quickly it happens. Random directions of remitted light would make glass translucent, not transparent. So for a few reasons, that’s not how it works.

There is no tree level photon-photon interaction. Photons scatter off electrons (or any other charged particle), not off neutral photons.

As a rule, it’s probably best to avoid “random” internet sources on matters of how light works because there’s so much confidently parroted misinformation out there. For example, this is completely wrong: https://youtu.be/FAivtXJOsiI See here for correct answers to that issue: https://youtu.be/CiHN0ZWE5bk

For how mirrors work see this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-physical-proc/ https://youtu.be/rYLzxcU6ROM

There's a hard rule about quantum physics. It goes: "it's all fun and games until you're at the Quantum level, then everything is all fucked up"

According to what we know, electrons don't "move between" energy states on an electron, they're just in one one moment and another the next. That's so disconnected from reality we perceive it still breaks my brain.

The loneliest of experience.