Leaping seconds and looping servers

Indeed. 1 day = 86400 seconds is a computation that was broken from the start. It wasn't working back in the day POSIX was defined, and of course, things could only go downhill from there.

As a bunch of others have pointed out, leap seconds are very similar in essence to timezones -or any other oddity of civil time- in that they are _arbitrary_. They really belong in the code that has no choice but to handle them: the system libraries (glibc for modern Linux distros).