THEORY: the original (pre-Daniel Craig) Bond films are actually just stories that Madeline tells her daughter

THEORY: the original (pre-Daniel Craig) Bond films are actually just stories that Madeline tells her daughter, starting at the end of No Time to Die.

Let me explain: we know that the order in which the 25 Bond films were made does not follow the order in which Ian Flemming’s novels were written. The first film featuring Daniel Craig – Casino Royale – is actually the first of Ian Flemming's novels, which introduced James Bond to the world in 1953. This establishes that the Daniel Craig series is meant to represent a kind of beginning that takes us deeper into the character's past. 

This is reinforced in the Daniel Craig series by how M, Q, and Moneypenny – the only permanent character fixtures across all the films – are represented. Q is young not old in this series; James "meets" Moneypenny for the first time in this series. Most entertaining, at the end of Skyfall we see Daniel Craig entering a wood-paneled office of a male M, and having an exchange about M's injured arm – all recurrently familiar to us from the historical Bond films. M, Q, and Moneypenny are our guideposts to film chronology, and the ending of Skyfall is therefore clearly meant to align that film to the beginning of the James Bond story arc. This is the beginning. The challenge though, is that a prominent sub-theme across the Daniel Craig films is that the character is getting old, he's not as sharp as he used to be, and much closer to retirement than to the start of a career. So how could this be the beginning if it already feels like the end?

In comes No Time to Die. This is [SPOILER] definitively the "end" of James Bond, as we see him die on the island.  The final scene of NTTD is of Madeline and her (and James') daughter driving the same windy road seen earlier in the film. Madeline turns to her daughter and says she wants to tell her a story of a man named "Bond, James Bond" before entering a darkened tunnel made to evoke the iconic down-the-barrel eagle eye view. The tales of James Bond are only now about to be told.

So how are we meant to understand this? The Daniel Craig series is the beginning AND the end of James Bond. All the other non-Daniel Craig films (Connery, Lazenby, Moore, Dalton, [Brosnan*]) are just the stories Madeline invents for her daughter about the "legend of James Bond," her father. 

The only "M" that Madeline knows is a man, hence her stories feature M as a man. The Q she knows is young and at the start of his career, hence he gets older as her stories progress. In No Time to Die, we see Madeline being exposed to events and scenes that form the basis of her storytelling – a magic car that can withstand bullets and has a switchboard full of tricks, a derelict nuclear / submarine base that serves as the bad guy's evil lair, a vehicle that's both a plane and submersible. She already knows about Spectre and through her trusted access as Blofeld's psychiatrist, undoubtedly also absorbed all there is to know about his relationship to James Bond, enough to set him up as the prime arch-nemesis in her stories. 

All of this serves as the source material for Madeline's invented (and exaggerated) storytelling. In fact the events of some of the historical Bond films are sometimes so over-the-top (ex. Moonraker) that they actually sound more like a child's bedtime story, than a real-world telling. This is in contrast to the Daniel Craig films which feature these elements, but in a more muted, realistic way. 

It's said that every person dies twice – the first time is when they truly pass away, the second time is when people stop telling stories about them. James Bond is dead, so it makes sense that Madeline would want to keep him alive – through storytelling – for James' daughter to remember and know him. In another one of No Time to Die's final scenes, M recites a quote that appears in Ian Flemming's You Only Live Twice novel. Indeed, James Bond does get to live twice. Daniel Craig's films are James Bond's life as it was, all other films are James Bond's legend as they were told.

*NOTE: Since the Brosnan and Daniel Craig films commonly feature the same female M (Judi Dench), and if M is a chronology guidepost, an argument could be made that the Brosnan films should be grouped together with Daniel Craig's.