If an alternative chain was to be constructed without triggering armadillo, it would still need to somehow bypass the timestamp linking to the main bitcoin blocks.

And this is a PoW system, if a chain passes the consensus rules and has more work than the other chain, it is the chain all daemons will resolve to. There’s no possibility of “picking a branch” like in PoS.

The thing with armadillo is that, when a node detects something fishy the RPC stops marking transactions as confirmed from that point onwards, so if you send a transaction during the time armadillo was getting triggered across the network you should consider that it may be reversed (just like any transaction at the tip of any blockchain could).

According to the clanker:

“Safe mode is a protective response by the node software to attack alerts. The chain can continue progressing while the node refuses to vouch for confirmations.
[…]
Applications must respect the warning. An application that independently trusts block counts or ignores the node’s confirmation interface could defeat the protection.”

I was also told there’s an upcoming upgrade to the system called FACON (fork aware consensus). Maybe @Nuh knows that better.