Maybe some kind of temporal type system could control for that?

Or polynomial complexity type system

you would have to encode the hardware in the type system :P

also the rest of the state of the universe

I guess maybe you could have it do some testing on primitive operations to establish a baseline, and then measure the difference of higher order compositions of those those primitives to ensure things complete within expected time scales

I wonder if a temporal contract system type thing could help mitigate against timing attacks

Looks like the latest EOS VM built on wasm has metering "At no point during parsing or evaluation does EOS-VM use unbounded recursion or loops, everything is tightly bound to limit or eliminate the ability for a bad or corrupt Wasm to cause a crash or infinitely hang the machine." https://github.com/EOSIO/eos-vm/blob/master/README.md