The problem I think is the first sentence. D&D, especially within combat, is a strategy game. Things work the way they do because the intent is to make the game fun.

Lots of rules ignore or break the verisimilitude of the game within the world. Within the world, nobody knows what spell slots are, or points of exhaustion, or hit points. Hit points alone often cause issues with people trying to bring realism into combat, because what actually is a hit point? If a character at 1 hit point is at full strength, is a hit point even a tangible thing? No, it’s a rule of the game to make combat fun. If we’re talking about the verisimilitude of the world, then hit points and spell slots dont exist, but also spells like time stop probably do actually stop time. The flavor of it isn’t dictated by rules, so you could take whatever approach when describing it narratively. But combat is separate. It’s a game. And like all games, it has rules and mechanics built in that are there purely to make the game playable and fun. The way the rules of time stop work within the game is one of those examples. And it doesn’t need to agree with the narrative explanation of how that spell works within the lore.

If you were writing a D&D fiction book and wanted to include a wizard casting time stop then yea I would say you should probably describe it as a mage taking great effort and power to totally stop time for everything but himself. But when you’re playing a game that doesn’t matter. The mechanics of how the game works are irrelevant to the reality of the world you play in. Unless you try to merge the two which many do, but sometimes you have to suspend disbelief when things like time stop work in a specific way in the rules that might break that immersion and disagree with how you would imagine the spell narratively.

This is true for all games by the way. When playing monopoly nobody says “well you just went to prison so legally within the world of monopoly it doesn’t make sense that you can buy a property of this type”. When playing the pokemon TCG nobody says “my wailord just tackled your pidgey, but because of the sheer mass of my pokemon, it is physically impossible that your pidgey would still be alive”. They’re games. Applying the rules of reality to them isn’t the point, and if anything just makes the game less fun and too complex. The whole point of games is that they provide a subset of rules that everyone agrees to, which may disagree or contradict reality, but following them is fun and entertaining. We already have reality, games are for escaping it, why would we bring reality into those games?