Unfortunately, the only viable solution is to add your own date field, populate it, and change your sorting and filtering to use that new field.
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Using the “created on” to sort instead of published on, worked for my situation in this case. I can see how that won’t be the best solution for everyone.
The main thing problem will be drafts. If your workflow involves creating the CMS item only when you’re ready to publish it, you should be OK. If you create an item and then publish it later, the date will be off.
Be cautious about backup restores as well. It may reset all of the create dates since technically it’s creating a new copy of all of those items.
The custom date field workaround wouldn’t be half as bad if the field had the option to pre-populate itself to today’s date/time to save the manual entry 
I’d like to expand on that statement-
It would be nice if every field type could be set to a default value, based on a template record that is itself a CMS item type.
Dates would be the one dynamic one, allowing initialization to the current datetime OR a static value.