I agree completely with the first half of your post.

However "about an hour ago", "last week", "a few years ago", etc. is really annoying in e.g. IM software or file managers. I always have a clock on my screen, and I much prefer having an exact timestamp from which I can quickly determine as much information as I need.

The notable exception to this preference is using the "halfling" mode of KDE Fuzzy Clock[0] (and clones) where the current time appears as, for example "Second Breakfast".

[0] https://github.com/KDE/kdeplasma-addons/blob/master/applets/...