You get time from all sorts of technically reversible things though! Even in a totally classical universe entropy gives us an arrow of time. Under MWI decoherence is reversible, but is functionally irreversible in the same way entropy is.
You're right though, I very much doubt QFT as it stands is the bottom. However, that doesn't mean the current debate is stupid. Whatever underlies QM, you'd still expect the measurement effect to also be an emergent property. The debate about whether atoms existed is still meaningful even though we now know that "atom" isn't a perfectly natural category. Indeed there are protons and such underling the physics, but the protons do pretend to be atoms much of the time, and thus pretend to do all the things we use atoms to predict.
Similarly, MWI and collapse (as well as, if less so, weirder theories) can be good explanations as to why a quantum phenomenon occurs even if there's also a reason they happen.