WTH can't we schedule one-time service calls?

Month of "What the heck?!"
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I agree with Taras and Petro here, what you asking for is too close to something existing (an automation) to be worth time adding a new element to the core for.
The blueprint Taras linked to further up already does what you want already afaict. I would only change the input selector from ‘time’ to ‘datetime’ to have it run only once, I would do that rather than using ‘time’ and then shutting the automation off. With datetime you can a) schedule something for tomorrow or later and b) just keep one automation per nr of tasks you want to schedule in parallel and no need to delete or re-activate.
You can make a tile card on your dashboard with the automation as the entity, set the interaction to navigate to the editing screen of the automation. That would be a one click way to get you to a screen with an input for a timepoint and a task.
A Datetime trigger is robust against restarts, except if the restart is going on at the time you want the task to start. You could add a restart trigger and a line that checks the last time the automation ran against the input time and the current time to fix that I guess?

So in short: you can have it now with a blueprint, or wait and hope someone will invest time to build it into core. Your choice.

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I would also love to have a more generic “Do this once at x:y” or “Do this once in x seconds” directly from a dashboard. I.e schedule toggle a switch 5 minutes from now, or press a button today at 13:35. Something like the unix “at” command but accessible via detailed entity views for buttons, switches etc, and ideally for actions as well although I understand that actions are way more complicated from a UI point of view.

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A similar conversation on Discord in the context of assist: