This is only for 32-bit systems. 64-bit systems have always used a 64-bit timestamp.
The difficulty is that the ABI defines a 32-bit timestamp on 32-bit kernels so that can't easily be changed without breaking backwards compatibility. That's what this post is about.
So for desktops and servers this has been solved for years already. I don't know how prevalent 32-bit is in embedded versus 64-bit.