People tend to hate change in general, so these things are hard to shift once put in place. That doesn't take away the fact that humanity managed to thrive without DST for thousands of years, so clearly it can be done.
They effectively did have DST. They just didn't implement at as a two segment step function like we do. They implemented it as a 365 segment step function (366 segments in leap years). I.e., they synchronized their activities to sunrise.