I'm actually just halfway through "A concise history of Albania" by Fischer and Schmitt, so I just got past the Ottoman Empire in that. Most definitely not a historian of course. :D But indeed none of this shows up there. Although for the record, in the book I mentioned Kadare describes the areas between Arnavutluk and the capital of the empire (a lot of the book happens on this trajectory). And yeah, none of the Albanians, in Albania or outside, that I've talked to ever had any such problems. Although a lot of them do suffer from what looks a lot like "aspirational poverty" to me...
Still fantasy. The tense system of Bulgarian[0] and Macedonian is one of the most complex within the Slavic family, and contact with Turkish, if anything, only made it more complex by introducing an evidential distinction to the past tense.
The Ottoman Empire actually had very little detrimental impact on Balkan languages. There was language shift to Turkish among a few urban elites, but most of the Albanian population was rural and so continued speaking Albanian, Greek, South Slavic, or Aromanian just like they always had. Both Turkish and the languages of the Balkan Sprachbund have rich tense systems (richer than that of English), and no one has ever had any difficulty expressing past versus present versus future.