That might work, but the second order effect would probably be companies trying to do the work of time synchronisation themselves in case it happened again. That would lead to fragmentation and incompatibility.

The cloud providers already use their own NTP infrastructure. Much of it is public and you can use it for free, too.

Turn what off?

Time itself maybe, I know I could use with a little bit of a pause.

I really enjoyed the first part (say 2-3 weeks) of COVID lockdowns, we had the longest in the world here and it got pretty old by the end of it, but the first few weeks, no traffic, no noise, quiet city.

It was like a vacation for our heads.

Not sure how, but a yearly "lockdown vacation" would be a Good Thing for our cities (IMNSHO).

Return to the basement now. No escape.

pool.ntp.org dns resolution and any servers that they control, presumably

The ntp pool is actually independently run and funded and has nothing to do with the NTPd implementation nor the NTP Foundation, other than them allowing the pool to use that DNS name.