Wow, really nice. Idea: if the section headers could be kept floating in the far-left, then no need to repead as icons at intervals.

I feel your pain on the overlapping titles. When creating a timeline application, there's usually only a short time between 'let's connect to Wikidata' and needing to deal with live label clustering and deconfliction.

There is a global timeline. It is distorted, just like space.

Cool. Where do you get the list of events from?

Oh nice. Check out this, it could be of your interest https://www.historytimeline.com/