Okay so... here's the thing.
- 1963 - Spider-Man's comic starts. Peter Parker struggles with balancing his life as a hero with his life as a student and a dutiful nephew for Aunt May.
- 1973 - Gwen Stacy, who up to this point had been strongly established as Peter's true love, is killed during Peter's fight with the Green Goblin. In the aftermath, MJ and Peter work through their grief together and eventually become an item, though for a long time, Peter continues to conceal his secret identity from her. (The background for this was that killing someone was seen as a way to reset Peter's status quo, and Gwen drew the short straw because the writers were struggling to find stories to tell with her.)
- 1984 - MJ reveals that she's known Peter was Spider-Man since almost the very start of his career.
- 1987 - Peter and MJ get married.
- 1994 - The Clone Saga begins. It's been made clear that a big motivation for the Clone Saga was to reset Spider-Man's status quo by having Peter retire with MJ and their oncoming baby, while the clone of Peter (AKA Ben Reilly) takes over, with the reveal that he's actually the REAL Peter Parker and the one married to MJ is the clone. Over the course of fan backlash and editorial changes mid-production over the next THREE YEARS, this doesn't end up happening.
- 1997-1999 - After the Clone Saga debacle, Ben Reilly becomes the Scarlet Spider, Peter and MJ's baby is stillborn (really kidnapped by Osborn, but not really) Aunt May dies (turns out this was an impostor and May was really alive, really a shell game by Osborn AGAIN) and all of this leads up to the reboot of ASM with Vol 2, where Peter has retired from being Spider-Man but is promptly brought back into the game because of Mattie Franklin masquerading as Spider-Man (which in turn leads to her getting her own solo book after Peter puts the webs back on, which takes like a couple months tops).
- 2007 - OMD happens and Peter and MJ's marriage is erased by Mephisto.
So look: Gwen's relation with Peter was always fraught because he never revealed to her that he was Spider-Man, and she hated Spider-Man because of his role in her father's death. The writers spent the better part of ten years milking that story and then ran out of ideas on what to do with the situation. So they killed her and then unexpectedly reaped the benefits of causing comic books' big coming of age moment.
Over the next TWENTY YEARS, Peter and MJ go from grieving Gwen's loss to being married, and a good portion of that is spent with them being happily married, with MJ at least partially onboard with Peter continuing to be Spider-Man. But by 1994, editorial had come to the conclusion that they already wanted out of that situation so they could reset Peter's status quo AGAIN.
They tried to have it both ways with the Clone Saga, and for a bunch of reasons it didn't work out, and it takes them years to finally find an exit ramp that DOES work, which is OMD.
They knew they couldn't just kill MJ -- 1999 was when Gail Simone started writing about Women In Refrigerators and it was clear that they couldn't get lightning to strike twice -- so they needed another exit, and eventually they found it. And we've spent the last TWENTY YEARS arguing about it.
Here's the point: who's idea was it to let Peter and MJ get married if it was evident, seemingly from the very jump, that editorial was not going to be interested in letting that be Peter's new permanent status quo going forward? What changed that made them decide that they NEEDED to reset him to being single and constantly shit outta luck as his baseline state? Have the last twenty years of him BEING in that state (after twenty years of being steady with MJ) resulted in more stories about Peter Parker strugglebussing with being Spider-Man?
When those twenty years include the Ultimate Spider-Man, the NEW Ultimate Spider-Man, the Superior Spider-Man, a half-dozen Spider-Verse events where Peter is but one of hundreds of Spider-Mans, not all of whom are variants of Peter? As well as NORMAN OSBORN becoming Spider-Man while Peter is off-planet for a year? The Beyond storyline where Ben is a corporate Spider-Man while Peter's in the hospital? Did resetting the status quo with OMD even WORK?
Did Marvel's editorial really get what they wanted in the first place? And did OMD really facilitate all of that happening? Or could it all have happened without OMD happening AT ALL?
To be clear: this isn't to say that OMD was the right move, or a good story, or a bad story, but instead, it's about how insisting on a single unbroken continuity over SIXTY-PLUS YEARS introduces constraints that you wouldn't have if you let folks just tell the stories they want to tell and don't insist on a status quo that everything needs to return to before the next creative team comes onto the book. Especially since every creative team is going to tell their own stories regardless, and that's been true ever since 1963.
Anyhow, there's the timeline review. Who knows what the hell is gonna happen in ASM 1000 that'll top all the nonsense we've already been through.