> Finally, one lead put their feet down and mandated that setting timezone to PST should be the first thing all applications do and db columns should be considered PST unless otherwise required.

That seems to me like a really bad mandate. If you are going to mandate something, mandate UTC. If someone forced me to change a system from UTC to something else, I’d not be very happy. It’s the kind of decision which makes you seriously question if you want to work there any more.