[defrost]

> But so does resolving to a date. I don't see how resolving to a date which cares about leap days fixes any of that.

So why bring it up then?

> You should use a monotonic clock with an arbitrary starting point anyway

Sure. We started doing that more than 50 years ago now when broad area geophysical surveying started off.

> unless you need some kind of synchronization between devices,

Can't see the problem - there are ways of syncing base station records against aircraft | boat | vehicle records in post processing .. all the stations, fixed or mobile, use a monotonic epoch based record structure that hold channel data and any sync marks that are broadcast by whatever means - raw GPS time serves well enough for a grain of 1.5 seconds, other marks can be used as required.