It was always about saving fuel during wartime. Farmers dislike DST.
Notwithstanding, I am pleased we have daylight savings. It makes me happy and seems like an appropriate and proportionate response to the variation in length of the day.
I confess in the grand scheme, this is not a major concern of mine. It isn't as easy as just moving to UTC, though. When families move, you typically try and keep the same "clock" bedtimes, as an easy example. (Even though, they actually care about sun height for bedtime/waketime.)
I'm not suggesting we go backwards towards a pre-modern time. We do have some great flaws in what we are doing now (modernity). Our civilization runs on clock time and is very productive, yet we live in very dysfunctional and unhealthy ways.
Specifically, I'm saying I would like it if we had a stable measure to the sun time of where we are. We don't. But it is not DST that really kills it. Rather, the idea that the sun down/up times are static for a place is weak. At best.
Switching to UTC changes all that. And, almost as important, it doesn't help in the least: you still need to think about your co-worker's geographic location when trying to find a time that's good for your phone call.
If you're in the East Coast US and its 5am and at the same time its also 5am in Japan, but they mean different things, you no longer "understand" what time it is in Japan. You don't really have much of a way of answering "is it a good time to call someone in Japan?" - You have to figure out a way to "translate" from your time to theirs. It would be very, very confusing. So in the end you'd end up re-inventing time zones.
It only works if nobody knows anything about other parts of the world.
And then let "Sunday", "Monday" etc become simply approximate terms. And I never have any idea what day of the month it is so I don't care. (Birthdays and public holidays are set based some recurring feature of the count.)
A refinement of this uses a time period that is approximately 100,000th of a day so then people can easily notice the day. In practice we might use hectokiloperiods instead of periods. Someone will invite a less woeful name.
Nothing about telling time will be particular familiar. Doesn't mean it won't work. But I suspect it'll be awful. I'm fine with daylight savings and all the rest of it. Except days of months. Can't we just say "Monday, third week of June"? or "Wednesday, 39th week"?
We would basically be replacing standard timezone conversion with some kind of non numeric system of identifying the time of day in a place by comparing it to normal activities. We would be getting rid of timezones and create something like "activity" zones. It would be a nightmare.
If sunlight had no bearing on human activity, and people didn't tend to follow similar patterns, then utc would be fine.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=heart+attacks+daylight+savings&t=f...
It becomes more complicated to translate between system time and civil time, but there are relatively few applications for which you really need to be able to do that conversion — and libraries that handle those cases are complicated already.
But people like to know when they did something based on their own clock. Already that one hour shift causes goddamn headaches in showing the proper time to the user for past events.
Now instead of just figuring out if we're across one threshold or another and adjusting another hour, we have to figure out what time of what day it was and figure out what the offset was at that time?
No. Just get rid of DST.
Deciding there are gradual drifts to standard time on a daily or weekly basis will cause some hassle. But it will not create a new class of problem that doesn't already exist and which doesn't already need to be fixed.
And time is absolutely the kind of problem that needs to be solved with a few standard libraries, rather than every two bit programmer thinking "i can add two hours to this number, it's a piece of cake".
Edit: The original, 19th-century impetus for time zones (vs solar time) was to reliably print and manage train schedules across longer East-West railroads. With powerful computers and satellite positioning cheaply available to everybody, we could overcome this now-obsolete hack.