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Why not store them as integers? Representing dates is a UI responsibility

Forcing all dates to be cast to a single time zone (UTC) complicates workflows when you’re on the other side of the globe. Many DBs have added a timestamp offset type for this to keep the data in the offset it occurred in.

I also want to be able to debug the database in an SQL console with nice looking date-times.

You can already do that: https://sqlite.org/lang_datefunc.html

Just to state the obvious, you can create a view which uses these functions to make your integer date/times readable, and then debugging is easy.

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