Having a good datetime standard is half the battle. The other (more difficult) half is getting broad adoption for it. If it was just a matter of computing within the bounds of my application then there are a bunch of great libraries that make this stuff easy already. However now the question is - if I pass an encoded ZonedDateTime object from my browser/server to a third party, will it be able to interpret it? Realistically I'm just going to convert it down to an ISO string or unix TS as always just to be safe, thus going back to the exact same problem.
If you drop the time zone, then you lose essential context that the consumer won't have unless you encode the time zone out of band. And no, an offset is not a time zone.
The answer to this is RFC 9557, which was recently published. Rust's Jiff library (of which I am the author) supports it. And I believe java.time supports it. Otherwise, yes, adoption will take time. But it's the right way forward I think.
Temporal is getting standardized by the IETF so you can expect it will eventually have broad ecosystem support beyond Javascript, here is the RFC https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9557.html
