[Kevmo]

Wouldn’t it make sense to look at the speed of light during that epoch to be a rapidly decaying function? Then the mass of the universe isn’t going faster than the speed of light. And 15 billion years later, when mankind is obserfing the speed of light, it has every appearance of being a constant.

[Alamo-Girl]

Photons did not decouple for a good 300,000 years as measured from our present space time coordinates. Indeed, when the universe (space/time) was expanding faster than the speed of light, it was so hot there were no particles at all.

Or put another way, photons could not break the speed limit because they didn't exist yet - even though, in retrospect, we can use that measure (speed of light) as a constant to express how quickly the universe expanded in the Big Bang/Inflationary Model.