Obviously time doesn't exist. Too much confusion about it in popular science articles makes people hard to understand it. Like here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19170233.
This bit of the article should clear any misunderstanding on whether the existence of time is relevant for this discussion. Regardless of the actual existence of time, our perception of it is certainly real.
> Of course, although some physicists propose that time does not exist, time perception – our sense of time – does.
All of us know mechanisms why we perceive time - neural networks are consisted of units which current state is shaped by previous mutations. All physical objects are constantly mutating - but some of them have abilities to remember previous states.
See the work of physicist Lee Smolin in Time Reborn (https://www.amazon.co.uk/Time-Reborn-Crisis-Physics-Universe...) on why time and information might be the most fundamental concepts.
This does not mean though that we experience time in the same way - far from it. Just that passage of time is fundamental to information processing.