You're in good company. Something similar, minus the hydrogen phase, is proposed by Roger Penrose: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycles_of_Time
This of course requires the decay of protons.
if time passes and there's no observable difference, did it pass? I guess it makes no meaningful difference, but it's not really answering the underlying question of if some variable is advancing or not.
If nobody logs in to a multiplayer game, does the game world still exist?
Sure there are files sitting on a server somewhere waiting to be read when the first user logs in, there may even be a physics engine polling abstract data structures for updates, but the game world doesn't render without players present with their computers bringing all this data into a coherent structure.
Also, for an extra existential kick, realize that it renders /independently/ in the GPU/CPU/RAM of each player's computer.
heat death just implies no work can be done. time still flows
First, in many local processes entropy moves from high to low (e.g. life). Nobody says that time is moving backwards for living things. It only increases if you consider the system it is embedded in as well. So this idea that entropy is time is something that only applies to the entire universe?
It's true that we don't see eggs unbreaking, or broken coffee cups flying off the floor and reassembling. This increase in entropy seems to give an "arrow" of time, but to my mind this view (ironically) confuses cause with effect.
If you have any causal system (cause preceding effects) then you will always see this type of entropic increase, by simple statistics. There are just many, many more ways for things to be scrambled and high entropy than ordered and low entropy.
So yes, entropy does tend to increase over time, but that's an effect of being in a causal system, not the system itself. At least, that's my view.
Perfectly true that entropy gets us in the end as we age, as the system breaks down and cannot sustain itself any longer. Although if we could fix those systems, there's no reason in principle we couldn't halt aging entirely.
I am slightly blending the concept of entropy and complexity. But "ordered complexity" is how I imagine it.
It works a bit like air conditioning: yeah, you can make one room cold, but only by making more heat outside the room. The overall temperature of the system increases.
Partly, but mostly because there would be no lunch, so there would be no illusion of lunch-time any more.
This is required to make Penrose's end state Conformal i.e. scale invariant, so that it can arbitrarily Cycle to a small scale to make a new Bing Bang Cosmology (CCC).