@Xover I'm not a coder, but I'm willing to spend some time looking at things. I'll see if I can at least isolate the problem for why this bug occurred, then that should expedite the solution hopefully. We'll see what happens.

There are genuine logistical reasons why this may have been implemented. While three tildes counts as a signature for the purposes of notifications, a lot of bots, at least on enwiki, require the standard (UTC) timestamp to function right. Besides that, I'm pretty sure it would interfere with T207567 which uses regex to parse the date and decide when to load.
I could be wrong, though.

The discussion to move can reasonably interpreted as consensus. I'm therefore removing that tag.

@Aklapper Would this be a good first bug?

Using the latest version of AWB fixed this issue. I'm going to close this as resolved.

@Aklapper No, that's supposed to be reversed. I should just accept I'll never be good at Phabricator and agree to never try stuff like that. :/

@Daimona I recently submitted T226563. If that task was implemented, would it provide a possible solution?

+Me

In T166138#5091156, @Aklapper wrote:

@MattLongCT: As you prioritized this task, do you plan to work on it? If so, please set yourself as assignee - thanks!