+1 for having Now() available in formulas, even if it is only periodically refreshed.
My main use case is calculating the current cycle time for work that is still in progress, e.g.:
Now() - Start Date
For this use case, Now() absolutely doesn’t need to be real-time. A value that refreshes every ~15 minutes, similar to Airtable’s approach, would already be perfectly sufficient.
Using scheduled automations to maintain a separate “current time” field feels like quite a lot of additional setup for something that conceptually belongs in a formula.
So from my perspective, I’d much rather have a slightly stale Now() than no Now() at all.
I’d also be very interested to hear if there are any plans or developments around this, as it looks like several people in the community have use cases for it.
related: "Now" function is missing