Possibly some of those theories from the early 20th century are part of the problem.

Consider that as mobile organisms, this sentient interface our body has with its situation functions as a sequence of perceptions, in order to navigate, so our experience of time is as the point of the present, moving past to future. Which is codified as measures of duration and correlated with measures of distance, to come up with "spacetime."

The evident reality, for those of us not confined to classrooms and conference halls, is that activity and the resulting change turns future to past. Potential>actual>residual. Tomorrow becomes yesterday, because the earth turns. Duration is the present, as the events coalesce and dissolve.

There is no dimension of time, because the past is consumed by the present, to inform and drive it. Causality and conservation of energy. Cause becomes effect.

No time traveling through wormholes in the "fabric of spacetime," with the right mathematical faerie dust.

Different clocks can run at different rates simply because they are separate actions. Think metabolism.

That culture is about synchronizing society as one communal organism, based on the same languages, rules measures, it might seem like there should be one universal Newtonian flow of time, but it's rabbit time, turtle time, etc. Nature is so diverse and yet integrated, because everything doesn't march to the beat of the same drummer.

Energy is "conserved," because it manifests this presence, creating time, temperature, pressure, color, sound. Frequencies and amplitudes, rates and degrees.

The energy goes past to future, because the patterns generated come and go, future to past. Energy drives the wave, the fluctuations rise and fall. No tiny strings necessary.

Consciousness also goes past to future, while thoughts go future to past, though it's the digestive system processing the energy, the nervous system sorting the information and the circulation system as feedback in the middle, so there is an intellectual tendency to focus on the patterns, over the processes generating them. Math over the actual physics. Consequently a lot of the confusion in physics.