It will change the access time too. Almost every suggestion in the post has this problem which is unfortunate since access/modify/create time are used in a lot

It will change the access time too. Almost every suggestion in the post has this problem which is unfortunate since access/modify/create time are used in a lot of scripts to see which files were or were not processed by prior runs of a script (whether this is a good idea or not). It is very difficult to write truly idempotent bash scripts (consider log files). Creating sort of idempotent or at least rerunnable scripts would be nice but I think even that would take more care than this.