I'm not a physicist, but I believe that's the exact insight that led to special relativity. It goes something like: If your moving at 1,000kmh next to a jet moving at 1,100kmh then the jet is moving at 100kmh relative to you. Eventually people realized those wasn't the case with light. No matter how fast the observer is, light still moves at 299,792,458m/s. Einstein figured out that if the speed of light is fixed despite relative motion, then time must slow down as you move faster. So from the perspective of a photon no time has passed since its departure.