^ In reality, yeah, time dilation's a thing.
It's a thing, but not in the sense that time passes differently in different places.
In the "twin paradox," for example, one twin stays on earth, while the other leaves on a rocket ship traveling at very high speeds, then returns to earth. The twin on earth will have aged more.
But that has to do with the traveling twin undergoing changes in velocity that the twin on earth did not experience.
In space opera, with the characters moving around to different locations in space, and using faster-than-light travel, it would be impossible to try to deal with that coherently.
Using hyper space to travel around is a fantasy element, nobody really knows how that would affect things, and every time somebody left a world to go someplace else, you would have to try to figure out what the characters' relative velocity had been during their respective journeys when they met up again later.
It would be a complete mess, really.