A simple middle school formula really spells it out clearly.
If you’ve no distance or velocity, you don’t have time.
If we pretend that velocity is heat (electron excitation, though technically a cloud), you can see why we can never get to absolute zero without discontinuity (black hole), so time increases or the universe gets larger. There is a reason being cold, slow, and dense are linked.
You can keep increasing the heat to “infinity”, making time slower and slower relatively.
I had a similar line of thinking. Just because you can measure something doesn't mean it fundamentally exists. We can measure things like pressure and temperature, but that doesn't mean they are fundamental in any way.
Even atomic clocks measure time by the change of position of particles.
We measure years by the positional change of the Earth relative to the sun.
Each human made clock measures time by some positional change which repeats in equal enough intervals to stay consistent.