The endpoint tells the time. The curve refuses to.

A clock hand is a line from the centre to an angle. Take away the rigidity and you still have both ends in exactly the right place — only the 300 pixels in between stop agreeing to be a line. That is the whole design: the information is unchanged, and it becomes almost unreadable, because a person reads the direction of the stroke, not the position of its endpoint.

The strings are elastic, not inextensible. That is measured, not stylistic: in the reference, a dragged hand stretched to roughly three times its resting arc and came back. A rigid verlet chain cannot do that, so the constraint solver here runs few iterations at low stiffness and caps per-segment stretch instead of forbidding it.

Set MODE to Rods to remove the slack and watch the joke evaporate: the same clock, the same physics loop, instantly legible and completely uninteresting. That comparison is the case — it is also what the --strings oracle asserts.