These black holes sit in the middle of the galaxy so it’s likely they were created early in the life of the galaxy.

Galaxies were still being created much after the Big Bang and the universe coming into existence.

No, I meant universe. I believe the current models expect that galaxies formed around these SMBHs, not the other way around. After all, if they're collapsing directly from clouds of extremely hot gas, and they have the mass of thousands or millions of stars, it's hard to imagine there were already thousands or millions of stars in the local area not sweeping up or disturbing all that gas.

Correct, the article places UHZ1 at 13.2 billion light-years away, so roughly ~500 Gy into our 13.7-billion-year-old universe.

My?

Yes, thank you.