The main assumption was just that it's missing and thus will eventually be added.
In my case I will need quite a lot of different per-instance timers, so using setTimeout I'd also need to associate those with each instance and whatnot. I'm not even sure how I would do that technically tbh other than storing everything in an object with arrays. (I'm a bit of a js scrub)
I'm not fully coding in JS (and I don't plan to) so it's more than likely that eventually I'll have to mix timers in events and JS. The main reason why I use JS is that it's just so vastly superior/quicker/easier to work with for heavy data-driven stuff.
Either way I can also just shove that part back into the eventsheet by calling a function where I set the timer, though that wouldn't be nearly as clean. I remembered I could also abuse the Tween behavior as a timer since it has a scripting interface (and even further benefits like "Is ANY playing") though I don't know if there's any performance implications for value tweens vs timer behavior.