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> there’s no way to measure time directly. It clearly exists, yet all you can measure is change of things besides time.

If it can't be measured then it can't be said to clearly exist.

Imagine a cellular automata where particles have lots of "slots" that could be used for moving or interacting. As the particle speeds up and more slots are used for moving, there are fewer slots for the kind of interaction change that we use to measure time. At the highest speed, with all possible slots used for motion, the particle would experience no change, which is indistinguishable from no time passing.

Does that sound familiar to anything? It's certainly possible that light being a speed limit, time dilation, relativity, and so on are in some way actually describing change rather than time.