As long as you leave a margin so as not to cross the line on a red, I don't see where that can possibly be illegal (though I've been admonished by a Judge for believeing so). It's kinda like thought crimes. Very problemic in my estimation.
You don't automatically get the right of way when your light turns green. If other traffic is in the intersection at the time, you must yield right of way to it.
Trying to "time" a green light is very dangerous unless you can see that there is no way any opposing traffic could enter the intersection before you get there. While it's hard to define exactly what would constitute illegal "timing" of a light, I would suggest that it is dangerous for a motorist to approach an intersection which is showing a red signal or contains opposing traffic in such fashion that the motorist would be unable to stop before it.
From a technical perspective, yeah, it shouldn't be a problem, but in practice, there are some situations that arise wherein it could be a very big problem:
-- You're timing and someone in cross traffic blows the light at the same time, so you t-bone them or they t-bone you.
-- You're timing and emergency traffic trips the preemptor so your light unexpectedly stays red forcing you to drop anchor -- hard -- at the last instant.
You may well be right about the legality in your state, and it may or may not be different across the country, so I'll conceded that point unless/until I find hard data to the contrary.
I think everyone does the "timing" thing to some extent, and it's actually prtty smart if done conservatively as a means to avoid excess braking and accelerating, so we agree there. If there's any aspect of the practice that might be illegal, it would be the case where someone's crossing the limit line at or above the posted limit just as the light goes green, and it would only be illegal owing to the elevated risk that such a vehicle would be exposed to a substantively elevated risk of getting t-boned by inattentive cross trafffic blowing their red light.