[antonvs]

It might be good evidence for something else if it were correct. It’s not correct, though. As I mentioned in another comment, infinite time dilation (from the reference frame of an external observer) is only an issue exactly at the event horizon. But the events that lead to a supermassive black hole “switching on” are happening at the accretion disk, far enough away from the event horizon for time dilation to be an effect we’d have to measure carefully to detect.

Also, the idea that you’d want a model that avoids time dilation here makes no sense. We know gravitational time dilation is a real effect because we’ve measured it, it matches the predictions of general relativity, and GPS would be very inaccurate if they didn’t correctly take the effect into account. To say that time dilation doesn’t occur near a black hole is completely inconsistent with well-verified facts.

From this, we can conclude that Lerner’s conjecture is wrong. We can’t even call it a theory, because it doesn’t match the evidence.