... As soon as that software became commonly used, anyone who might steal your device from you will simply use a faraday cage when seizing it, that defense would be useless in that case.
If there is a "dead hand" timed bricking mechanism, it would not have to be on-line, would it?
That's true.
You could do this yourself then. Setup a script that starts when you lock the screen, and times out after however long. When time out is reached, do any prerequisites, delete disk encryption headers, power off. Setting the timeout would be the difficult part, it needs to be less than the remaining battery + safety margin (so you can be sure that the script reliably completes before the battery dies). You lose alot of usability after that, it would be difficult at first to remember to unlock the device before your script wipes the disk encryption headers.
Or a more high risk strategy might be to have a panic script, in your taskbar say. That would be simpler, the panic script would begin the timeout period, or even the header wiping directly. This assumes your adversary gives you enough time to hit the panic button though, hence the high risk part.
I'm not keen on any of these solutions, it's better if taking you by surprise is a high cost to an adversary. You can do that by keeping private stuff on separate disks, without encryption headers, except when you're using them.