When I lived in London the seasonal variation in sunrise was just one of those things you lived with.

Everyone gets wrenched by the start and end of BST, but generally if someone says "5pm" or "17:00" you get a seasonal sense of how much daylight that implies. I can't imagine the US - or anywhere else - being different, except possibly close to the poles.

Absolute sun position matters a lot less than the felt relationship between clock time and sun position. That sense changes slowly but reliably over the year.

The obvious benefit of time zones is that virtually everyone you interact with daily has the same subjective time sense. Everyone knows that midday is going to be bright, midnight is going to be dark, and the rest is going to vary with the season.

A single universal time would lose that.

I've thought occasionally about a clock standard that has 0800 be sunrise every day, and run the rest of the clock until whatever time necessary to reach the next day's 0800 point... unworkable for blatant reasons but it would do away with the dissonance of waking up in darkness or post-twilight morning depending on seasons.

Yeah, I grew up in Oslo, Norway, and found his idea that the sun rising around 4am in summer was something unusual very strange. To me, sunrise occurring well before I wanted to wake up in summer was the norm.

But then we also have far longer periods of sunlight during the summer.

What's annoying me even now in London is that sunset still comes too early during the summer (during the winter, on the other hand, I definitively appreciate the longer days here vs. Norway)