You just never want to see this message:
Helpfully, as Glenn Fleishman points out, there’s this article from Josh Centers and TidBITS which lays out various fixes. Key to them all is making sure there’s a backup if you want to actually recover the data on your iOS device.
Trouble is that if it’s disabled like that, the device might stop pinging the network so there would be no clock reset.
I would like to call this fake and I have my doubts, but it occurs something like this is probably possible if the device time was very wrong and got fixed after the device locked up. Which is exactly the sort of thing a 3 year-old might do: change the time into the distant future, lock the device, and wait for the iPad to reset its clock based on a network request.
Verdict: Plausible (at the least).
It seems to be a known bug: https://www.lifewire.com/my-ipod-or-iphone-is-disabled-why-and-how-do-i-fix-it-1999475
Even if it isn’t intentionally disabled, that would probably break HTTPS and might break other protocols.
But my assumption here is more the other way around: The kid set the clock to ~48 years from now, the lock engaged, then the iPad updated its clock and wound it back 48 years to present day. So now you’re locked out for 48 years.
That looks like an old iPad. This could be fixed already (but I’m not going to try it).