I made an update to Discourse a couple weeks ago that attempts to handle this better:
This forces the timeline to only show 2 lines of text and hide the rest. So when text may be very long and/or the space available for the timeline is limited (narrow screens) it might look something like this:
This hides some or all of the date information on the handle in some cases, but prevents layout issues with the back button and avoids overlap with the date at the top of the timeline.
The date information on the timeline is a little redundant with the dates on posts themselves, so this seemed like a worthwhile tradeoff to avoid these issues where the layout breaks.
