That core feature of "providing a total ordering for state changes and events with formal trust bounds" turns out to have a lot of potential uses.
Now of course truly providing correct timestamps or really any clock mechanism in a trustless way turns out to be massively difficult. And not just in a blockchain but really in any decentralised/distributed system. It's a famously unsolved problem.
There's some research[1] on how to go about providing a "global time"/"global clock" for cryptocurrencies without external trust assumptions but it's extraordinarily academic and most if not all systems just assume trusted time within some bound and hope for the best.
1. Permissionless Clock Synchronization with Public Setup - https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1220
Over great distances this breaks down given limits on the speeds of transmition (speed of light), however, if transmission was instantaneous (quantum entanglement?), that would solve the dilemma of what does "now" mean light-years away given our relativistic idea of time between here and there.
Proof of work does a decent job approximating a monotonic clock but that only works when you are expending obscene amounts of energy on a global scale. And like you said it breaks down over longer distances (however luckily we don't have to deal with that too much now).
But in any non-PoW system, a "trustless" global clock is extremely non-trivial.
