Pulling on my pedant braces for a moment.

In the The Chase 1965 the rotor clearly wasn't the uppy downy thing it was in a panel of the console.

It wasn't in a number of Jon Pertwee stories either where like the dematerialisation circuit it's sometimes an extractable component.

There is the central column which sometimes goes up and down but sometimes stands still while other components move inside and there is the Time Rotor which is sometimes inside the column but sometimes isn't.

The wooden primary console didn't have a column at all:

neither did the Melkur Tardis

or the Rani's first onscreen Tardis which had a spinning Kryptonian ring thing instead.

That said the writers rarely bothered to check on past stories when they wrote dialogue regarding any aspect of the show.

As JNT said, "The memory cheats" and this is as much true of the writers of the show and writers of Who wiki's as the fans themselves.

Tom Baker referred to the Daleks as robots in Destiny Of The Daleks, then you have the UNIT dating, the Doctor's age, his Morbius incarnations.

Ultimately it's a show about an alien who (sometimes) has two hearts and travels through time and space and as such continuity is just begging to be broken.