Things happen, some things happen before other things. We count time by using clocks, they tick at regular rates with respect to other things happening.
If a clock is in a frame of faster time, it will tick faster, its ticks will happen before, than an identical clock in a frame of slower time.
That’s how I see time, it is the ordering of physical events, which we can trivially observe.
You keep trying to explain time as if it was a thing of its own, like a water flow, but it is no more than an abstraction to indicate how some things happen before others, and they definitely do, at least in the same frame.
This analogy is insufficient as well of course. For instance, if we have two clocks, we move one onto a faster time frame for a while and then bring it back, it is as if the clock was an ordered stack of physical events, the ordering between the events in either stack is tricky to determine, but you could clearly observe that one stack was more filled than the other.
I am not trying to get into a fight, this is simply a welcome exercise that forces me to crystallize my own understanding, hope it is for you too.