Well...I'm sure that GNU R can do timelines in that it can visualize pretty much any collection of data on a computer anyhow you want, but that's going to involve a pretty substantial learning curve; it probably won't meet your bar for being "intuitive". It's a programming language for statistical analysis and visualization. It'd be most useful if you already have a lot of data in some kind of computer-readable format that you want to visualize at scale.

searches

Here's an R package, timevis, which does some of this stuff:

https://github.com/daattali/timevis/

There's another, vistime:

https://github.com/shosaco/vistime/

If you have an example image of the sort that you want to create, that might help people give recommendations.

Like, you talk about different timescales. Are you wanting something that can simultaneously display stuff at geologic timescales and daily stuff? Do you want to generate static images? Just be able to zoom in and out yourself?