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we were ought to insert a negative leap second, but cowards got too afraid it would break code

No, the current rules are being relaxed because with the current ones, a negative leap second _might_ happen in the near future.

It did not happen yet. No negative leap second that should have been inserted was skipped.

See this chart here:

You can see the the positive leap seconds as jumps upward once the graph reaches around -0.5 s.

We were never close to reaching +0.5 seconds with a positive trend and we are still relatively far away from that.