Flatland is an interesting way to think about dimensions. If we were living in a 2D world, anything living in the 3D world would blow our minds and do things we would think should be impossible.
IMHO the correct way to handle leap seconds would have been at the same layer as timezones, i.e. a display-only thing. Timezone databases are regularly updated, you push out leap second updates there. In the worst case, people's clocks are off by one second but all the underlying timing logic doesn't crash.
The problem with TAI is that the rest of the world uses UTC. So you can use TAI on a small island and then you have to convert to and from UTC. My hobby kernel is based on TAI internally. And it constantly converts to and from UTC.
You do not use TAI to communicate with the rest of the world, except for certain special purposes.
As you say, what the computer should maintain internally and for communication with other computers, not with humans, is only true time and not other quantities, like the angles between Earth, Sun and stars.
Only TAI is true time, while "universal time" is an angle and "universal time coordinated" (UTC) and its derivatives are some weird hybrid quantities that can be computed from times and angles.
The conversions between true time and various kinds of official times used by humans are very complex and they should be handled in a single place, not in various places that may handle time zones and discrepancies between UTC and TAI and various other "times", e.g. UT2, UT1 etc.
I fully expect in such a regime, people would be complaining about how the leap second insertion caused their recurring meeting to shift from 9am to 8:59:59
TL;DR: "while a new jail in Nashville was still under construction, staff discovered missing keys and other anomalies. Surveillance footage eventually revealed that someone had repeatedly disguised themselves as a construction worker and entered the building many times. Inside, they hid weapons, tools, and escape items in walls and rooms around the facility."
Reminds me of the US Embassy in Russia that was built, by Russians, who embedded thousands of spying devices within the building itself. It took 27 years to build, then debug the building.
The US bugged the “toilet partitions” of the Russian embassy in D.C. during its construction[0] and the FBI built a tunnel under it for espionage purposes in the 80s[1].
Facebook moved from subversion to git around 2008. Some of their teams then switched to mercurial around 2014 (I could be wrong by a couple years here or there). By 2014, git was already the main tool everyone was using —- no amount of backing by a single company would have tilted the scales.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland