Don't know where you are coming from here, other than blanket skepticism.
I didn't say people saw oceans - this was before people, and there was no land.
Absence of light meant the sun did not shine on the earth for millions of years
And continents ROSE out of the sea - continents are made of granite which is
lighter and less dense than basalt.
As I have repeatedly stated earlier, the Earth’s crust and atmosphere would have to come first before water and wind.
And when water did come, IT DIDN’T COVER THE ENTIRE CRUST.
So, land or the continent didn’t have to rise out of the primeval sea.
And, Genesis isn’t the only myth that supported dry lands rose out from primeval ocean.
According to the Heliopolitian myth of Creator sun god first Atum and then later of Ra, was the god who cause the first mound to rise out of the primeval ocean Nu (or Nun). This sacred mound was supposedly the first dry land, located at I͗wnw, which the Greeks would later call it Heliopolis (Ήλιούπολις), naming after their own sun god, Helios.
The ancient Sumerian called their primeval waters Abzû (freshwater ocean) and Nammu (salty water ocean), which the Akkadians (later Assyrians and Babylonians) called them respectively as Apsû and Tiamat (read Enûma Elish, “Epic of Creation”).
Tiamat appeared in Babylonian myth as a monster or as a dragon, whom Marduk slain in Enûma Elish, and Marduk became ruler of the gods, but the older Sumerian Nammu never appeared in these forms, and was never slain by Marduk. Marduk cut up Tiamat’s body to create the sky and lands.
In Sumerian literature, unlike Enûma Elish, there were no war between the old gods and the new gods .In Sumerian myth, Marduk was only a minor god, and his name don’t even appear in the Akkadian/Old Babylonian Epic of Atrahasis and Epic of Gilgamesh.
All these myths predated Genesis. They were in the Bronze Age (3rd and 2nd millennia BCE, whereas Genesis was composed in the Iron Age, probably about the 7th century BCE at the earliest. And the myth of Gilgamesh was so popular in 2nd millennium BCE that tablets were spread as far west as Hattusa (Hittite capital), Ugarit, Megiddo (Canaan) and Amarna (Aktenaten’s cult centre in Egypt).
So what is found in Genesis, is hardly original.