Time limits are hard to do well, and most game designers are crap. There's no reason time limits have to be bad - indeed, even hard time limits (those that end in irrevocable failure states for the player) don't have to be game-breakingly unpleasant, though taking control away from the player is almost always bad design.

If you want a time limit to be acceptable to the greatest number of players, you don't necessarily need to nerf what the effect of the time limit is, you just need to give the player enough information to decide what they want to do about it, and enough agency that what they do changes the feel of the effect. Say you want to avoid - as was mentioned earlier in this thread - a situation where a player powerlevels right through the challenge of an encounter; a mid-boss, say (since preventing powerlevelling through end-boss difficulty is just handled with some form of power limiter like level/skill/ability/damage caps). You can do that, you can put a hard timer on the interaction with that mid-boss, but you need to make sure that the player a) knows there is a timer b) has a general idea of what the timer state is c) understands what will happen when time runs out and d) has option(s) to pursue which change either the timer (as you do sidequests you postpone the event because mid-boss has to replace the minions you keep killing and eating) or the effect of the timed event (mid-boss has fewer allies because you were out stabbing kidneys the night prior; you are more powerful because you levelled up). So you can keep your timer as long as you give the player a way to make them feel like they're in control of it, you know?

There are plenty of ways to do timers well - that's just basic comprehensive design. But big companies design based on the ideas of business majors who don't know dick about system design and reward cycles, and little companies are mostly people who are making games because they're passionate about and want to make games, not because they're good at making them.