Lots of complaints here about how "before" somehow "crosses a line" and this isn't science any more. I guess I think it's more gradient than that. We're mad because this is "before", but just the other day, we had headlines indicating that ... may be ... the universe is 2x older than what I've been told for years. At this point, I'm totally with Nate Bargatze on this stuff:
The age of the universe seems to me to be completely irrelevant to the existence of time "prior" to the beginning of time. It's like asking what is "outside" an infinite universe.
Or a bounded but finite one with a topology that folds back in on itself. What confuses me is when physicists talk of spacetime (maybe) emerging from something more fundamental
https://youtu.be/lkCvP4jttHI