So Cloudflare suggests there are two ways of doing timelock encryption: you can rely on some proxy for the passage of time, such as repeated hashing; or you can rely on one or more trusted agents.

I don't think the 'proxy' approach is timelock encryption, because it doesn't actually rely on the passage of time. Cloudflare is relying on a network of trusted agents that 'tick' at a predictable rate.

I think I wouldn't want to rely on this network of trusted agents to preserve a long-lived secret. There's no guarantee that the network will still exist when it's time to reveal thw secret.

Is there a way to do timelock encryption that doesn't involve reliance on a third-party, and that really depends on the actual time, rather than on a proxy for time? I cn't see it, but I'm not very clever.