At the time this episode first aired, Star Trek fans were highly critical of Voyager. And they had plenty of good reasons.
I suspect the producers, et. al., knew about this and gave the fans as direct a response as they could in this quote from Cosimo in the episode: "We exist in what you would call a temporal inversion fold in the space time continuum. It's not necessary to understand. It only matters that there was an accident. Your shuttle intersected one of our time streams and, BOOM, a few things were altered as a result of the accident. History and events were scrambled a bit, and you ended up here."
The second and third sentences tell the story. It's as if the producers were saying to the fans, "Don't try to make sense of everything we do. Just go with it and enjoy the show." Pretty clever, if that's what Rick Berperson and company were trying to do.