I would love to scale the hud elements to '0.5'.

Thank you for your taking the time to make a feature request.

What you are suggesting would go against the design principles of this mod, which is "no configs, minimalistic vanilla fix". I will not implement any such functionality.

However, if you install a separate mod to scale the hud elements, Status Effect Timers should work properly with it. If not, that will be considered a bug.