You know how in Ocarina of Time, the people of Hyrule all experience seven years of Crap™ while Link sleeps in the Sacred Realm, and when he wakes up he realizes Ganondorf has taken over everything and the whole world has gone to hell so he has to fix it? And then at the end how Zelda hopes that sending him back to his childhood will allow him and everyone else to live the happy, peaceful lives they were meant to, implying that this time Ganondorf won't gain power and nothing will go to hell in the first place?

OR you know how in Back to the Future Part II, Doc and Marty end up in the absolute nightmare that 1985 Hill Valley has become since Biff went back to '55 and gave himself the almanac, but then when the guys have fixed everything back in '55 the people of the original*/repaired '85 have no memory of Biff's Hell '85™ because they never actually lived through it in their eventual experiences of the final/Real timeline?

...sometimes (no pun intended) I wonder if we're currently living in the Hell Timeline or Hell Universe but our time-travelling hero just hasn't fixed things yet before winding back the clock (maybe even flying around the earth to make it spin in retrograde??), resetting all our memories, and allowing us to wake up one day never having gone through the last [insert number] years. 🙁😵‍💫🤔🤕

(And then my head inevitably starts hurting 🤷)