you can only trust it so far as it's within an hour or so of the actual time it was mined. but there is an extranonce field for miners to use that gets incremented each attempt as well usually.

the consensus does not disallow out of order timestamps, only the previous block hash matters.

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er, the extranonce is actually part of the merkel tree hash iirc

Out of order timestamps are allowed. There are rules for how much though to limit gaming the difficulty adjustment