[goldemerald]

Solution 4 is so hilariously bad I am shocked it was suggested. Building a 2d landscape where the time dimension seems to take a random walk made laugh a lot. Ignoring the standard convention of "independent variable on x-axis" and instead embedding it as datapoints is a particularly clever way to obfuscate the data and confuse the reader.

[msm_]

I don't agree. It's a great way to visualise data when you want to focus on a trend. It makes it very obvious which "direction" is the data heading. But of course it is not very often used, is not a great fit for every use case (in particular, bad for the data in OP) and may be confusing when seen first time.

[sixthlime]

I thought so at first too, but if you look at the link they included [1] it seems like it can actually be quite clear for some datasets

[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/imagepages/2010/...