You didn’t read this correctly:

Even if time “dilates” for someone who is traveling near the speed of light, or nearer the source of a gravitational field, everything happening must share the same Now. If they didn’t, there would be a new active timeline created by each and every “thing” in the universe, that could never be rejoined — in effect proliferating universes at every moment — and this would be the effect of the passage of even a single photon of light traveling in space.

That “even if” wasn’t calling time dilation into question, it was raising the — at the moment impossible — occurrence of someone moving at, or near, the speed of light.

And, in the twins paradox example, it is the case that when the traveling twin returns, even though time has dilated for him, he catches up with his significantly older twin back on Earth — and in each of their cases, every thing that has happened has always happened “now” for them, starting from the “now” when they parted, up to the “now” when the traveling twin returns.

Because one is now 198 years older than the other, time has dilated for the traveling twin.

You are having an issue separating the present moment of time from “now.”

“Now” is the perspective you have on everything that happens in your life.

Being able to separate those two is something that mind-training specifically develops.