The time lock is pointless then. This is what I meant by random crypto making it hard to understand.

This blog post would be simpler to understand if you started out without any crypto. If I were to write it I would start with the case of a single IRC server. Then explain a channel is a key and the topic is the value. The first person to register a key on a server can control the value. Then to expand this approach to multiple severs you introduce the idea of using a kdf of the key concatenated with the irc server's identity.

The time-lock acts as a way to ensure names aren't revealed the moment channels are registered which would create a race condition where attackers could hijack names by registering them on other servers.

The channel name is something like time_lock(name_meta_data, server_details) -> deterministic channel name based on the parameters passed to the function (output is unique per server.) Just like if you used a hash function you get the same output for the same input. Since the time lock needs a certain amount of compute to elapse (and a certain amount of time to do it) -- it allows time for the name owner to register the appropriate channels on other servers.