That introduces dependency of a clock which might be undesirable, just had a similar problem where i also went for hardcoding for that reason.

There's already a clock dependency. The test fails because of that.

Arguably you should have a fixed start date for any given test, but time is quite hard to abstract out like that (there's enough time APIs you'd want OS support, but linux for example doesn't support clock namespaces for the realtime clock, only a few monotonic clocks)