I’ve never worked in environments where real time and system time had that much drift (due to ntp), but I acknowledge it probably happens out there in distributed systems. Accurate time is important!
With the restart code, people could run a kernel upgrade and reboot while the daemon is down... so if this ends up causing a huge clock adjustment you're screwed.
I've had distributed systems perform unreliably in the < 30s range even with ntpupdate syncing in place.