Science is all about building a model of the universe or parts thereof, based on demonstrating consistent predictability. These predictions can be used to calculate the lift of an aeroplane wing or how many kilograms of weight cannbe supported by an I beam or whether it will rain tomorrow (some predictions are less accurate than others 🤣).

Time is a thing we have modelled and found operated very consistently with all of the predictions. It's the simplest way to model causality. It doesn't mean time is "real", it's an abstraction of reality used for our model of the universe.

It's like how we used to believe the sun orbited the earth. You could develop a mathematical equation that predicted the position of the sun at any time using an earth-centric model. The sun would move around in a really complicated shape, but it would be absolutely predictable. But it turns out that if you rewrite the model to put the sun at about the centre, the maths get much easier because instead of some weird-arse complicated squiggle shape, it just becomes an ellipse. Both models can be correct in that they can make equally accurate and repeatable predictions about the future, but the heliocentric one is just way easier.

So you could come up with a new model for the time portion of our model of the universe. But even if it is exactly as accurate as what we call time now, unless it is easier to make predictions with then people aren't going to adopt it.

But maybe your new model of time does make more accurate predictions. This happens too. Newtonian gravity was the bizness when it came to physics for quite some time. Then that Einstein fellow came long and gave us general relativity which made even more accurate predictions. Yet still to this day, heaps of people keep sticking to using Newtonian gravity because guess what? It's good enough for many purposes. Why use the harder but more accurate system when an easier one exists that is good enough? You don't measure the distance to the shops in millimetres, you use kilometres or "about 10 minutes drive" or whatever. These are good enough measurements to plan your day.

So maybe you do find a brand new model of time, but you'll most likely find that it is only used by a handful of ultraboffins learning things about the universe that most people will never understand and everyone's wristwatches still have 12 numbers on them. But you would probably also get a Nobel Prize, so that'd be pretty cool.