First, there's a typo in your question: the proof proceeds by assuming for contradiction that $P$ is countable (not uncountable, as you've written).
More substantively, countability is used right away: we write $P$ as $\{x_n: n\in\mathbb{N}\}$ and recursively define a sequence of sets $V_n$ ($n\in\mathbb{N}$).
If $P$ were uncountable, we couldn't index the elements of $P$ by natural numbers. We'd have to index them by something else - say, some uncountable ordinal. So now $P$ has the form $\{y_\eta:\eta<\lambda\}$ for some $\lambda>\omega$.
We can now proceed to build our $V$-sets as before, but at the "first infinite step" we run into trouble: we need $V_\eta\cap P$ to be nonempty for each $\eta$, but how do we keep that up forever? In fact, our $V$-sets might disappear entirely: while at each finite stage we've stayed nonempty, but we could easily "become empty in the limit" (consider the sequence of sets $(0,1)\supset(0,{1\over 2})\supset (0,{1\over 3})\supset ...$). The recursive construction of the $V_n$s - which is the heart of the whole proof - relies on always having a "most recent" $V$-set at each stage, that is, only considering at most $\mathbb{N}$-many $V$-sets in total. That this is sufficient follows from the countability of $P$. As soon as we drop this, our contradiction vanishes.