Really? So if you want to compare that two times are really the same time for two different timezones, you'd want to convert them to UTC first? What's the use case for this?
Seems like the less-used way to me.
The fact that your intuition of "these two timestamps are equal" is "these two timestamps denotes the same instant" seems problematic when we know that the notions of timestamps and time are not in fact aligned (because, for example, of leap seconds).
But an API should never get into a place where your personal choices should matter and various incompatible interpretations potentially make sense to different people.
No, most people do want to compare times in different TZs without the extra cruft.
I think a better API would be to have a different types for timezone- naive vs. aware datetimes, and a canonical way to convert either of those types into an instant in time (requiring a timezone be attached for the naive type). Then the instants in time could be compared with the equals operator without confusion.
Those who say that don't know what it means. And given how much I have to deal with crap APIs that disregard those principles it's safe to ignore discussions leading elsewhere