+1, seems like leap seconds could be covered via a leap hour every 10k years or so. Implemented as a daylight savings change that gets skipped. Implement it at the level of time zones, which is complexity that we already have to deal with most of the time when we want to interface with humans.
It's not totally clear to me why they think "Given that the first leap hour would not happen for centuries, it is not clear that any systems (legal or technological) would build in the necessary complexity for handling it." It seems like that infrastructure is already in place— the IANA time zone database, and associated technology. UTC would become disconnected from sun-time, but all the other zones could shift relative to it, and it seems like most things would continue to handle it as expected.
But, I also trust that other folks have thought about it in more depth than I have. I'm not seriously trying to solve the problem (If I were, I'd get involved in standards committees or similar), and I'm happy to concede that my solution misses key details :)
I tend to agree with what you’re saying. My impression is that the main concern is for current technology used by astronomers, satellites, navigation and so on, which require leap seconds to be taken into account and have a relation to the length of day, and which would stop working correctly if the meaning of broken-down time would suddenly change. It maybe wouldn’t be a major problem if all such systems could be redesigned from scratch.
In that case UTC has the same problem (steadily increasing numbers of leap seconds till we run out of places^Wtimes to put them), so we may as well have a less defective timekeeping system in the mean time.
