The univalence axiom has nothing to do with pinning down models (except perhaps that if you are talking about models internally, it says that you’re pinning them down up to isomorphism rather than up to some notion of syntactic equality). Non-standard models are essential for getting an intuition about what is and isn’t provable; most of the arguments that I’ve seen for unexpectedly interesting terms involve picking a non-standard model, finding a point in that model with unexpected properties (e.g., something that is false in the standard model), and then construct that point. See, for example, this post, which constructs a nonstandard point on the circle, one for which you can’t exhibit a path from it to the basepoint of the circle. More generally, see The Elements of an Inductive Type for a good explanation of why non-standard models are inescapable.
The univalence axiom has nothing to do with pinning down models (except perhaps that if you are talking about models internally, it says that you’re pinning them down up to isomorphism rather than up to some notion of syntactic equality). Non-standard models are essential for getting an intuition about what is and isn’t provable; most of the arguments that I’ve seen for unexpectedly interesting terms involve picking a non-standard model, finding a point in that model with unexpected properties (e.g., something that is false in the standard model), and then construct that point. See, for example, this post, which constructs a nonstandard point on the circle, one for which you can’t exhibit a path from it to the basepoint of the circle. More generally, see The Elements of an Inductive Type for a good explanation of why non-standard models are inescapable.