No, you're not getting it. The individual player clocks are irrelevant, the only clock that matters is the town's. Specifically, the point where enough clocks run out that the town has lost. Sure, there might be 3 or 4 townies running around, but if there's 3 or 4 mafia too, then who cares how much time the townies have left?
So if you're a townie, you always spam abilities if you have more time than the game will last. That's obvious and I'm hoping we all knew that. But you see, if you're not surviving to the end of the game anyways, you might as well spam off all your abilities ASAP. By lasting longer you're only delaying the inevitable. Breaking lylo on D6 and breaking lylo on D4 are the same loss, except in one case you have all these abilities used that might of helped you catch a scum. Point is, there's simply no room between "will die after the game ends so it's irrelevant" and "dies before game ends, breaking lylo and losing the game for the town, game ends with a loss". Well, I guess if a townie and mafia player ran out of time at the same time things would be fine, but then you have to make sure that both the sacrificial lambs have a purpose, had fun, and contributed to their team somehow.
If MCing time left screws over the town, statistically, the town would wind up randomly losing more games than I would consider acceptable to lose via random chance. If there's even two townies in a 13p game with gimped timers that run out before MC, that's borderline too many. Worst case is running out ON lylo since then the town loses no matter what it does.