Time can still exist within determinism but this is largely what I think.
Cool to see that there's some science acknowledging this idea. I've been trying to wrap my head around time for quite a few years.
My understanding is that time is perceived due to our constantly changing consciousness. It's this condition that allows us to consider one moment different from the next. Objectively, all moments are simply one, and any event that we experience continues to exist independently of whether or not we're perceiving it.
The analogy of the flatlanders sums this up pretty nice for me. Imagine a second-dimensional being living on a flat plane, like a piece of paper. That being would be able to move forward, backwards, left, and right. To the flatlander, those would be the only possible options. The concept of
verticality, of moving
up or down, would be absolutely foreign to it, and if it tried to express these ideas to a fellow flatlander they'd consider him bat-shit insane.
HOWEVER, things are different for us in the third dimension. Since we observe from a higher spatial dimension, we can perceive the flatlander's entire plane - its entire reality - and can see that in its entirety it's really just one unit. Objectively - to US - the whole plane is connected and it doesn't move. To the FLATLANDER, there are separate areas of its plane that it must move to in order to access.
The same principle applies to us in the third dimension. The main difference is that instead of moving from A to B through distance we're moving from A to B through time, in a linear fashion, creating the illusion of
duration. However it's widely acknowledged that there are dimensions above ours - one being time, which we're moving through in one-direction -that we cannot perceive since we only possess sense organs developed within the constraints of the third spatial dimension.
HOWEVER, try to imagine yourself as a fourth-dimensional entity. Much like we would presently able to observe the entirety of the flatlander's 2-dimensional plane, we would be able to observe the entirety of the
temporal plane. With that, we would be able to see all the constructed events objectively, since our experience of them wouldn't be limited to the brief moments that we pass through them in 3D. The whole temporal plane would be laid out and we would be able to see the entire
procession of events - that is, from its absolute cause, through its effect, and the resulting dissolution into a new cause - as single 'temporal objects,' rather than just experiencing a fragment of an event when we pass through it in 'time.'
So, yeah. TL:DR; time is just a construct that we've developed out of necessity because we're stuck moving through a higher spatial/temporal dimension on a linear path. Events don't pass away in time, we just lack the capacity to see anything that passes beyond our temporal view.