The latest Webb telescope images of 19 face-on spiral galaxies are stunning. They show dust lanes with dark holes or bubbles and lots of stars sprinkled all over. If we were to look at the Milky-Way disk from above, it would likely appear the same.
The evidence that we live in a punctured interstellar medium is evident around us. In particular, the Sun just entered such a hole, called the Local Bubble, over the past few million years. This Bubble is a cavity of rarefied hot gas surrounded by a dense shell of cold gas and dust with a radius of a few hundred light years. Most of the young stars near the Sun lie on the expanding shell of this Bubble. The latest data indicates that a burst of supernova explosions near the bubble center triggered its expansion about 14 million years ago.