"2 days from now" could either mean "after 2*86400 seconds have ticked" or it could mean "when the wall clock looks like it does now, after 2 sunset events". These are not the same thing.
The intent of the thing demanding a future event matters. So you can have the right software abstractions all you like and people will still use the wrong thing.
The problem is that programmers are human, and humans don't reason in monotonic counters :)