Are you saying that they don’t let rate payers take advantage of low rates to advantage load shift?

That seems counterproductive and exploitative.

I have an EV and am on a Time of Use rate plane here in SF. My lowest rates are between 12am and 3pm every day. I charge the car and run everything I can in terms of major appliance use between these hours (dishwasher scheduled to start at midnight or manually run early in the day, washer/dryer loads run in the morning). I am home during the day which makes this easier to do though. Another solution of course would be to bank your solar generation or low rate electricity into a set of batteries that you could draw from during peak times.

PG&E doesn’t even give all its time-of-use ratepayers the same peak hours. The rates are nonsensical.

Australia has that in an even more extreme form, although it's more an emu curve there. In fact the CA one isn't really a duck any more either is it?