All jokes and "snarkiness" aside, it's just a matter of habit. If the whole world used UTC and working hours/social time were set differently per-country, I bet we'd get used to it eventually.
The other problem is that I don't think habits would be easy to change. Right now people in some european countries want to stay permanently on summer time to have more daylight after work. We could just as easily stay on winter time and have everyone go to work earlier, shops could open at 7 instead of 8, etc. But for some reason this isn't considered, so I assume it's easier to enact all year DST than to change working hours.
Like should public holidays e.g. start and end right in the middle of the solar day because that's when midnight UTC happens locally? Do you reintroduce time zones by the back door by defining a local start/end time for day-based events to align them back to the solar day?
Now might be a great time to do something like that. It doesn't sound like a serious proposal, but there would be interesting benefits to city-based timezones again in the modern world. We actually have the technology to scale smaller timezones now. We aren't relying on mechanical clocks like the train companies were and paper calendars like early multi-timezone companies like GE were. We could make local time resemble solar time a lot more again, and solve it as a software problem.
The world has changed and we often collaborate globally.
I remember we had todo this zoom meeting.
- 1 guy from USA - 1 guy from Europe - 1 guy from East Africa - 1 guy from Singapore
It was extremely difficult to schedule a meeting off head.
When the it was okay for the guy from East Africa to meet it was like 5 am in Singapore.
Even if you successfully organise the meeting.
The organizer having to translate all times to the respective time zones of the audience is just so painful.
Okay now we have Calendly a tool we have to sign up for. But conversations of scheduling would be much easier if everyone in the world used UTC
2. Making everyone in the world to use UTC is going to make everything less convenient for everyone who lives a few hours away from the UTC TZ (i.e., most of the world). Because in UTC many of their daily events are going to span 2 dates/weekdays.
3. For the handful of people who need to schedule cross TZ meetings there's https://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/meeting.html, no sign up required.