It's a human problem. Noone "expects" their own "minimal" checks to compound. And everyone (re)implements periodic checks in ever-more-inventive ways. BSD cron solves this ? Alright. Does prometheus use it to schedule its periodic polling ? Do OTel collectors use it to smear their backend metrics uploads ? Does your own code use cron jobs for its "periodic" heartbeating ?

If the answer to that is all-yes, then my compliments to you. Alas ... at least my experience says that's not how things are done.