An enjoyable discussion.

There's ma, and then there's ma.

Ma that gives the audience time to reflect on the course of the story through its nonlinearity does, paradoxically, move the story forward, but not the plot. Story in the audience's mind is more like a snowball rolling down a hill rather than a neatly segmented horizontal plot timeline.

But not all non-linearity increases the audience's perception of the story. Years ago on a peer-review writers' site, I read a number of scripts in which authors introduced a scene that had no real purpose other than to demonstrate the author's "edgy" flaunting of Hollywood's narrative tradition. This kind of self-serving notification did not work to enhance the story or even the reader's appreciation of the author's storytelling ability.