It's really annoying when I order a new VPS and it is set to whatever time zone the company's headquarters are located in. As if I give a damn about what time it is in PDT! I don't know about abolishing time zones in the real world, but at least for servers it makes total sense.
That, and the missing UTF-8 locale, are among the most annoying defaults that I routinely encounter on newly ordered servers.
Yes, I set all of my infrastructure to UTC and then keep the clock on whatever UI I'm using set to display distance from UTC in my current timezone (and current Unix timestamp in UTC). I feel like timezones are an important tool for humans, and it's so easy to customize your development machine's clock to take care of these calculations for you. It's also millions of times easier to think in terms of events that happen across a system with wide distribution if everything is set to UTC, where a lot of companies and people will have to then start counting and scribbling arithmetic to keep track of what happened when, in two or more timezones.
That, and the missing UTF-8 locale, are among the most annoying defaults that I routinely encounter on newly ordered servers.