> You haven't managed to correctly communicate the fact that the person was woken up in the middle of the night.

If somebody wanted to communicate that they were woken up in the middle of the night, they could use this perfectly fine sentence:

"I was woken up in the middle of the night."

Communication wouldn't break down just because everybody didn't have an identical reference point w/r/t timestamps in relation to daylight cycle. Something we don't have today anyway, by the way. When is dinner, for example? (conservative answer: 16:00 to 23:00).

Yeah, and if only there were a way to more precisely say things like "in the middle of then night" or "around solar noon", or "halfway between lunch and dinner". We might even put numbers on these things so that everyone knows exactly what we're talking about!

Local time is incredibly useful. It's never going away. It's utter fantasy to think that everyone is ever going to just give up local time and only speak in vague terms like "an hour after noon".

This is true, although I find it much easier to "avoid night" than it is to look up individual timezones of each city and +1/-1 daylight differences and timezones that use 30-minute offsets and other schengens. Did you know that Nepal is UTC+5:45 and that daylight savings in USA and Mexico start on different dates?

Is Tokyo in the some timezone as Beijing? Is London in the same timezone as Reykjavik? Did Mexico start daylight savings last week or now? I have to look up stuff to answer these things, as well as the local timezone designation (is it ET or EDT? Is it CT stand for "california time" or CT for "central time"? Is there a CT in another part of the world that could be misunderstood by another participant?), so that I can publish the meeting time correctly without people misunderstanding it. Roughly avoiding unreasonable times is much easier to do than this. The sleep times of Reykjavik and the sleep times of London don't really differ by much, so as long as the proposed time steers clear of that, it will be fine.

In fact all I need is a world map that shows me the day/night part of the Earth as I slide the (UTC) time -- there are many apps that do this already. Then schedule the meeting such that the greatest number of participants fall under the daylight. Then publish the meeting as a single UTC time. That's it.

You're making it sound harder than it is. I'm literally just looking at a list of all the local times for the meeting's participants, so not even worrying about time zones at all. The calendar app itself already knows what everyone's time zone is and does all the time zone arithmetic for you. So it sounds pretty similar to what you're describing with the global view.