Yes, the idea in that forum post should work. Thank you for remembering that. I had forgotten about it.
The trick in MDL-35322 will work for Never submitted attempts, but will not work for attempts that have be Submitted.
It would be nice one day to get a proper interface in Moodle for teachers/admin to do these things. That is, basically add all the missing arrows to https://docs.moodle.org/dev/Better_handling_of_overdue_quiz_attempts#New_state_diagram