I finally managed to upload programs to these. That took a while

I eventually got the I2C interface to work on the T Beam, when I finally noticed that the I2C pins on the board do not match the I2C pins on the pinout diagram.

Nothing I have tried, which is everything I can try, will get an SD card ...

for what its worth:

https://github.com/ropg/ezTime

they claim to be backwards compatible with TimeLib.h

this has not been my experience