Switching everyone from UTC to TAI is too much work and if you try to use TAI while everyone else is on UTC you'll run into off-by-37 bugs everywhere. It's better to keep using UTC but add no more leap seconds to it.
If people didn't need leap seconds, they would already not be using them. There's absolutely no use case for adding leap seconds for a few decades and then stopping. Either put them in or don't.
At the time leap seconds were introduced, it was much rarer for anyone to be able to tell (much less care) that someone on a another continent had a clock a few seconds off from theirs (and those who cared most were probably astronomers, which is why we ended up with leap seconds). There's a reasonable argument that the number of bugs (and extra work for programmers) now caused by them is enough that we should just stop adding them (and perhaps change time zones every few millennia).
Of course, the 'correct' way to fix it would be to use TAI rather than UTC just about everywhere, but that change would be hard to implement compared to just not adding more leap seconds.
Leap seconds are the right thing to do but people didn't realize all the bugs and costs they would trigger. Now that we understand these costs we can and should change our minds.
Well, leap something is arguably the right thing to do, but I'm not convinced that seconds are the best size. It's very possible that a leap minute every century or two would cause less disruption. It's also possible that making leaps a lot more frequent would cause less disruption, because good code is well-tested and oblivious code is less impacted.
Which actually makes the problem more disruptive as when it needs to be solved the solution has to be rediscovered rather than retained as it is with problems that are more frequent.
> If people didn't need leap seconds, they would already not be using them.
Google already don't. But I think they had to patch their kernels etc. to achieve that.
Leap seconds were a bad solution and we should remove them from general-purpose computer systems (some very specialised systems may need them). But it's a massive coordination problem and most people just don't care enough to change anything.
No, but it has most of the same advantages and disadvantages as just ignoring them. I would bet that the only reason they apply a smear rather than just ignoring the leap second entirely is to keep their clocks in sync with the outside world.
