[paulryanrogers]

Even in your example those events do happen at a certain point in time. And if some attendees are virtual they may be several zones away. Ultimately people want to see their local TZ, whilst they want unambiguous data backing it.

Alarms are something of a special case, and with TZ aware types one could still adapt at the application later.

For a gift card system I once had relative expiration, enforced using the zone of the merchant location. Using a relative type actually felt like more work because from the merchant perspective, all that mattered was the point in time relative to their zone. It would've been simpler to do the offsetting in the app layer checks. And ultimately no one cared enough to keep maintaining it anyway, having an absolute point in time is usually good enough or even preferred.

[mattdw]

For events that have happened, absolutely. Events in the future are often slightly more ambiguous though!

I do agree that "with attached Timezone" or "as UTC" are absolutely the sensible defaults, I'm just suggesting that sometimes "plain" datetimes are semantically the correct choice.