There's a pretty common theme throughout popular science fiction that I'm just going to generically refer to as "time cops." It manifests physically, like how in Terminator an actual human being travels backward through time to try and maintain the structure of the timeline, or conceptually, as with Star Trek's Temporal Prime Directive. But in just about every sci-fi story that deals heavily with time travel, you'll find some variation on a time cop. Loki has a literal time cop agency responsible for crafting a sacred timeline, while Back to the Future's time cop is just a kid trying to keep himself from being erased.
And while sometimes you'll see the time traveler trying to edit the timeline, there's almost always either someone else trying to stop them (the actual time cop) or they're trying to make their edits with a very specific finesse to avoid drastic changes to the timeline (essentially policing their own goals). It's a very consistent trope in sci-fi time travel that I, personally, think we can do away with.
I think we need to stop worrying about "damaging" the timeline. I think we can go ahead with telling the time traveling stories we want with whatever motives and conflicts we can. The restriction of "timeline preservation" has hampered the stories we've been able to tell, and for a few good reasons I think we'll get better stories if we can all just agree to ignore the whole concept of timeline pollution.
Multiverse Theory
Look, I'm just going to go ahead and say that if you want time travel in a universe without predestination, the only thing that makes sense is a multiverse. A universe where every possible course of events plays out on a widely varied web of parallel and crisscrossing timelines. Sci-fi novelists have explored the idea at length in the past, but the highest profile version of this is, obviously, the MCU. Starting with Avengers: Endgame and then reinforced by Loki, Marvel has officially codified the idea that there are an infinite number of possible timelines.
Time travel in the MCU is less about you going into your own past (though yes, you are technically doing that) than it is about you jumping into the beginning of a new timeline. Any actions you make at that point don't alter the timeline, they create a new one. Then, when you jump "forward" back to the future, it's less like you jumped into the future than it is you simply returned to your own timeline. Assuming you did it at the time you left, there won't be any significant changes.
For our purposes here, we're ignoring the gigantic plot hole in Endgame represented by Steve Rogers showing up how he did at the end.
This allows you to explore permutations of events and characters in your story without unnecessary and frequently extremely convoluted continuity checks that will, inevitably, be incomplete. This allows you to do some interesting introspection, some silly hijinks, or even just change the pace or tone of your story without re-starting the whole thing from scratch. And afterward you'll have set up the expectation of a multiverse, which may give you more scope for future projects if you'd like. Marvel did this best with Loki, in my humble opinion, but there are literally countless possible ways to do this right.
Continuity Paradoxes
While choosing not to care about timeline pollution will certainly give you more scope through the acceptance of a multiverse, it will also relieve an absurd amount of stress from your plotting. If you want to tell a time travel story that adheres to some sort of sacred timeline (like you're the TVA or something), you've got to make sure that everything lines up. Baby's First Timeline would probably look something like the continuity of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, where a whole bunch of bizarre or unexplained happenings during the first half of the story are explained during the second half of the story by having the time traveling characters do them.
This is certainly easy enough for audiences to follow, but if you've spent any even mildly engaged brain cycles on the events of that book, I'm sure you've noticed there are more than a few plot holes. Even setting aside the idea that time travel as introduced in that universe is too easy to not be used more than it is, there are just bits where the chronology just doesn't quite fit, or where it strains belief that what happened would have been possible at all given the limitations we're presented with. Even very simply constructed continuities will spawn their own little paradoxes, to say nothing of the frankly ridiculous chronologies of stuff like TENET.
Instead of driving yourself into a frenzy trying to tease out every possible little paradox you'd need to address in your story, how about, just... not doing that? Just decide it doesn't matter, and tell the story you want to tell how you want to tell it. Just let your characters trigger a new timeline, pollute it how they will, and then hand-wave some magic time technology that allows them to return to the 23rd century with some whales. While The Voyage Home isn't a perfect time travel story, I think there's a lot of wisdom in Scotty's justification for polluting the timeline with transparent aluminum and just not caring.
"How do we know he didn't invent the bloody thing?"
It's a fair point. You're the author. Just say that he did.
Interesting Stories
In the end, all we're really trying to do is tell interesting stories. If you're trying to stick to some sort of causality-driven timeline without branching, you're going to limit yourself immensely without actually adding interest to the story. All conflict in a fictional story is artificial, of course, you made it up. But having somebody jump back in time and accidentally screw up their timeline feels like artificial conflict in this day and age because, well... we've seen it done. Basically if your time-hopping story isn't going to introduce some incredibly innovative ways for the time travel to interact with the normal timeline, like TENET, then I'm sorry, but it's just going to feel stale.
So why bother? At this point the most interesting stories to tell involving time travel aren't going to be grandfather paradoxes like Back to the Future, they're going to be displacement stories, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Whether it's straight displacement or some form of exploration, or whether your protagonist is the time traveler or the primitive caught up in the traveling, there's an enormous number of directions you can go from that basic premise that won't involve a photograph from the future slowly fading out of existence.
So if it reduces your stress, allows you to keep internal logic to your story, and still enables you to tell interesting stories... why not? I pose again the figure of the time cop, and ask whether you really think you can tell that without it feeling just like, well... Time Cop. Perhaps you're writing an homage to classic 80's sci-fi? Well sure, then the time cop makes perfect sense. But if you're not then my suggestion remains a simple one.
Don't worry about preserving the timeline. It's probably not really worth it anyway.
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