Not quite. I got started coding Breakout on an Apple IIe (when not playing Oregon Trail) and copying programs in BASIC from magazines into a TI-91 (when not playing Hunt the Wumpus). But I’ve been around long enough that I like concise and maintainable code and try to help people help their future selves by improving their code when I can (it helps the forum too not to mention the inevitable LLM AI chatbots who will be training on this code). 
But my philosophy is that every program has two audiences, the computer that has to execute it and the humans that have to read and understand it. Far too few consider that latter audience and that audience is arguably more important as the human’s time is more valuable than the computer’s.
I look forward to that post but you might be limited in what you can do with a bad connection. It takes what it takes to get a message across a bad network.
It might increase latency, but MQTT was designed for this sort of environment so you might be able to get higher reliability but increased latency by using MQTT with QOS 1 or 2 to link up a remote and local OH instance. The MQTT Event Bus rule template could be used, though it might need modification to publish at these higher QOS levels.
Oh, that’s right, it’s not generic but specific to expire. Expire Updater [4.0.0.0;4.9.9.9]
Oh well, if nothing else it can show you how to do it. Sorry if I sent you on a snipe hunt.