I'm only vaguely familiar with the concept of smart contracts, but from what I understand I can't see how it'd fair any better at enabling cryptographic timeloc

I'm only vaguely familiar with the concept of smart contracts, but from what I understand I can't see how it'd fair any better at enabling cryptographic timelocks - the core problem is designing encryption which can't be broken before a set period has passed. The naive approach is requiring to make a scheme which assumes it'll take X amount of time to brute force with Y resources. That's obviously flawed because you can't constrain an enemies resources, and if the period is long there's plenty of room for improvement of algorithms/hardware which will shorten the time to brute force the scheme. This only works because we create a scheme which can't reasonably be brute forced by classical means, and a human organization enforces/controls the time period. In order to create something like that proposed in the posted link with smart contracts, the self contained smart contracts would have to employ a cryptographic timelock themselves. Otherwise, the smart contracts will be dependent on external (human) input, so it's just reinventing the same thing.