Maggie's Farm

Time as a persistent illusion is just a really awkward way of addressing the question of whether the next moment exists prior to our perception flowing into it, or if it is created by the actions we take in the past and present. And that's an equally flawed way of expressing it.
When you put all of the equations that seem to govern the universe together, all of the time parameters seem to cancel out. So what the equations describe is not the state of any one moment in history, but what the universe would look like from the outside of what we see as time and space.
This feeds further into the whole difference between "The universe is" and "the universe can be modeled as" which gets derided in the "Spherical chickens in a vaccuum" jokes.

No more than the distance between the Earth and the moon is a sensation. Time is a property of the universe. It's difficuly to explain this becasue the true language of the argument is not English; it's math. When you talk about time being relative, you are speaking of an aspect of time, duration, or two related aspects of time, Duration and Simultaneity. Einstein, based on the work of several predecessors, demonstrated that While observers will disagree about measurements of these aspects, there is still an aspect of the universe which defines differences in measurable quantities of the properties of space at differnt instances. Both Special and General Relativity are virtually defined by the existence of time, to allow for things like light to travel and waves to propagate through fields. INdeed, Einsteins work added time to the structure of the universe, rather than removing it as an outside entity and Newton largely did.