> If you're used to date changes happening "whenever", you'd stop assuming they happen at a fixed point during the day.
But that's not the case. We're not all cosmopolitans traveling the world all the time. For anyone living in a timezone where 00:00 happens when most people are asleep, there'd only be one word for tomorrow, as it'd be synonymous for "after date change" and "after the next sleep cycle". There would be no other word, because there is no need for that. Except in circles where coordinating meetings with people across the globe happens on a regular basis. But we already got that figured out by explicitly naming the time zone or using UTC.
The vast majority of people don't have to deal with this, so having the date change at night is just more convenient, as it completely avoids this ambiguity in day to day life.
But obviously as a nerd you get hung up on that one aspect and go "but imagine we had only one timezone, we could just say 13:00 and there'd be no ambiguity, no chance for a misunderstanding, it would be so much more efficient and coherent!"
> The argument against abolishing time zones always seems to assume that humanity would be incapable of adapting to a time zone free world.
Again, you need to take a step back and try to look at this from the average person's pov, not as a scientist trying to find the optimal solution for a problem 99% of people don't have. And "people would be able to adapt to this" Is a pretty weak argument. You could probably also change the clock itself so that there's 63 seconds in a minute, 59 minutes in an hour, and 195 hours in a day. I'm sure people could adapt to this. Doesn't make it a good argument.
On the other hand, just imagine the sheer chaos this switchover would cause worldwide, for what, marginal gains in convenience for a miniscule amount of people.
It reminds me of "that guy" who constantly wants to refactor half the codebase because something would look a little cleaner then, and if you let them, they'll end up refactoring the same part of the code over and over again every six months because they had another idea how to make it even more streamlined and elegant. And then someone else comes in wanting to implement a simple feature, but is greeted with an incomprehensible construct, while the refactoring-guy is repeatedly and excitedly reassuring them that it's "really simple and intuitive once you get the hang of it".