Friendly reminder: we have NIP-03 that nobody has ever used 😂
Personally I am ok with the tradeoff of not using a timestamp server because it's just too slow/costly/added complexity/expensive to verify. Notechains without external timestamping I refer to as weak consensus and for some applications it is acceptable.
There has been talk about using relays as timestamp services, which I could get behind. Basically a popular relay will receive random events at an average interval; the relay can publish a timestamp kind itself and it would reference a random event (probablh the most recent event since last tick) who's timestamp would be an impartial marker for that point in time. Interesting idea for something more nostr-native and less heavy.