Redoing my YouTube comment over here, so it doesn't get drowned out.
I have a very, very strange memory of this game. I actually had a copy of Journeyman Project at one time. My dad sat me down to play it with him, and there was some sort of bug that turned the volume on the Mac up as loud as it could go when the game started. The intro started playing and blasting through the speakers and I got so scared that I didn't touch the disk again for years. I must have been four years old at MOST when this happened.
Years later, I did try the game again, but didn't have the manual at that point, so failed the copy protection.
Later still, when I was around fifteen, I started watching Let's Plays of the series, but they didn't catch every nook and cranny of the games, so I bought all three games from eBay. This was in the WinXP era, so uh... The first two didn't work. The third one did, and I played that. It was good. A friend of mine happened to have a Win98 PC that DID run the first two games, so I left those disks with him. Around this time, someone was trying to remake the series in 3D. They even made a snazzy trailer, but damned if I can find that now. As you can probably guess, they did not remake the trilogy in 3D.
You are right. The whole idea of protecting history in this way makes no sense. They fix things a little in the sequels, but... Ehhh. It's a vehicle for going to cool times/places.
It seems from the end of your video that you haven't played the sequels, but they fix many of the problems that you're complaining about (and are advanced enough that you can't screw yourself over). You go to real historical sites in the second game with an AI that gives you trivia, jokes, and references. In the third game, you go to... less real historical sites... but the places you get to see have enough verisimilitude that there is still history you can learn from the AI companion. Not to mention you can go back to each timezone and keep some or all of the progress you have made when you do. In the third game, you even get a special spacesuit that can disguise you as someone relevant to each timezone you're in, so you can have actual conversations with the denizens of each time period.