Back-ups on Time Machine - How Do They Work?

Time Machine backs up every hour, then at the end of the day it exchanges the hourly backups for a daily backup. That works fine.
BUT, according to the directions, at the end of the week, it is supposed to replace the daily stashes with one weekly stash, and eventually, the weekly stashes with one monthly stash. The daily works; the others do not.
Am I misunderstanding the process here and it really doesn't do all these exchanges of smaller backups for a larger one, or is something wrong that I need to fix?
Thanks....TM is new to me and I'm not quite able to figure it out.

Can you explain your observations that lead you to believe the weeklies do not work? Monthly? I don't think there is a monthly "stash." It's hourly for 24 hours, daily for one month, and weekly until disk is full.
I'm looking back at my archive and it seems to have logical date-time stamped folders. The weeklies do not continuously adjust day-by-day based on the end date of the one-month daily backups. If the oldest weekly backup is 1 March, the next oldest is 8 March, and then 15 March. Those dates will not change.
I don't know technically how Time Machine merges the backups.

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