Where does your claim that photons don't move come from? Very simply, the Sun is 8 minutes from the Earth. The photon is most definitely moving from the Sun to the Earth.
There’s a tendency to treat spacetime intervals as something abstract and possibly metaphysical, because we can’t see or touch them, and they work counterintuitively.
They’re actually the opposite. Our normal experience of 3D space is what is unphysical; the (square root of the) spacetime interval is simply distance, measured in meters. Or seconds, of course.
The literal, physical distance between an absorption and emission event is always zero. Reality is non-Euclidean. The Manhattan distance is larger than the actual distance, which is usually true anyway.
Well, I suspect I just spent a lot of words telling you something you already knew, so I’ll leave off with a book recommendation. Dichronauts, by Greg Egan.
Between that and the Clockwork Rocket trilogy, I don’t know a better way to inculcate an intuition for special relativity.
One is set in a 2+2 spacetime; the other in 4+0. The differences are instructive.
Unfortunately photon behaviour is fairly important...
The point is that I think claims like "distance doesn't exist" is the kind of thinking that comes from people lost in notation.
I know the theory the view you're saying comes from, and the weight it has in academia, but it always struck me as useless. And that whoever came up with it was lost in notation.
Not from the photon's point of view. This is very crucial and it is not because of notation or maths. The real difference is from your point of view. I know it's counter-intuitive but that's different from being useless.
Sun->Earth or Sun->Jupiter is a small beer. It is the same for photons from the CMB being recorded. For them, they have been emitted and absorbed at the same instant and experienced no passage of time or distance traveled
What are the real physical consequences of thinking that the photon is "emitted and absorbed at the same instant"?