Imagine that a coin toss occurs in front of an observer. A fairly small amount of time is all it takes for the event to occur. Now comes a vital distinction: the overall event of the coin's arc as it launches into the air, spins, and comes down is not time. Time is a prerequisite for the coin toss to even occur along with logic, matter, and space; it is the duration during which the coin was in the air. Even if nothing had ever thrown the coin, the same amount of time would have elapsed. In other words, time is not the same as sequence, even if many people speak as if the two are interchangeable for the sake of convenient communication.
There is a difference, after all, between truly, blindly conflating the two and merely referring to them in more casual conversations as if they are the same just to save time. This is a difference completely overlooked by films like Tenet. The characters in this film vaguely speak of reversal of sequence as if time itself has been reversed. Moreover, they describe how a mere sequence reversal changes not only the order of events, but which events happen in the first place. Instead of fiery combustion, icy windows greet someone involved in a car accident. This kind of event is logically possible, but merely reversing events would not lead to such a chain of occurrences that are both inverted and substituted for other occurrences. The substitution of events aside, time is not an event.
One moment still leads to another no matter what physical events are occuring. It is the sequence of those events in the external world that can hypothetically be reversed. Time marches on regardless of what events happen in a causal sequence--yes, even reversing a sequence of events does not erase causality, but only alters it. Not even time and causality are identical. As with time and sequence, time is a metaphysical prerequisite for any cause and effect relationship in the material world to occur to begin with. Time can exist without material objects or their correlative/causal relationships, but material objects cannot causally affect each other apart from time.
The "inverted bullets" of Tenet cannot escape time or causality: they simply behave differently than conventional firearms would. There is still a cause and an effect, and there is still a linear flow of time from past to present to future. The only abnormalities are the sequence of certain events and the cause of the sequence inversion. Nothing about time, its "direction," or its separation of identity from causality has changed whatsoever. Time itself does not actually go backwards in the film. Moreover, nothing about time's flow could change unless time ceased to exist altogether. Any other sort of change is either a change of perception or sequence only or it is logically impossible.
Movies like Tenet and, in a different way, Terminator and (more recently) Avengers: Endgame tend to confuse audiences or convince them that logically impossible things are not actually impossible where time is concerned. This is not because they have incorporated ideas about time or time travel that are completely possible in a logical sense but merely "misunderstood" by the public. Sometimes the impossibility of the plots or time travel's role in the plots is suspected even when viewers cannot articulate exactly what they are thinking or when they do not personally know how to reason out why a given portrayal of time is philosophically false. Given the philosophical ineptitude and lack of intellectual initiative and autonomy many people exhibit, it is not shocking that some of the most foundational truths about time are only rarely understood while issues that would perhaps never otherwise need to be addressed are brought to the spotlight.
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