I must be misunderstanding what you are suggesting, since what it seems like you are suggesting would never work. High-resolution timing information is available to user applications via numerous APIs today. Hyrum's Law, and common sense, tell us we can't just lose this feature of operating systems and expect applications to work.

You can construct a high resolution timer from shared mutable memory and multiple threads. It's simple. One thread increments a counter, and the other thread reads it.