It was checking for something like “is it 9am in PST / PDT right now? What about EST / EDT?”
Or maybe, “what’s the current time in this list of time zones and then I’ll send notifications to users where it’s 9am”
Or something, I don’t specifically remember. The point is that notifications aren’t generated until they’re supposed to be sent, and we didn’t want that to vary by 1 hour with daylight savings.
And this specific use case aside, I think it’s true that there’s a class of use cases where developers do need to consider DST.