Yes, my inner physicist is hurting badly that neither author nor editor seems to grasp the subject enough to notice the inconsistency.

Yes "right" is "agree with everyone else", but in the existing documents by which various international agencies approved the use of UTC all of them did so along with an assertion that everyone was agreeing with "mean solar time"; i.e., that days are counted by measuring the rotation of the earth. Those engineers who are free to ignore regulations and statutes can choose to use something like GPS time, but many projects and systems are constrained to conform to existing regulations and do not have that liberty. Any project or system which is constrained to use both UTC and POSIX is SOL every time a leap second happens.
This international regulatory process has repeatedly failed to engage all the stakeholders in an open discussion of what everyone expects and needs. The result of that has been "failure of imagination" when one agency embarks on a course that differs from the existing agreements.

Look deeper at one of the underlying problems in this issue -- see blockquote in the "UTC in 1982" entry here. That paragraph was written by one of the folks who actually worked in the field of timekeeping, and those are the folks who produced the documents that get approved by the votes. (All the votes by those agencies that make the official documents are done by delegates who know next to nothing about the subject matter.) See how that 1982 paragraph crows about the way that UTC with leap seconds has solved all problems and become accepted by everyone. They were oblivious to the problems that would crop up. The process of making the decisions and producing these international recommendations has not changed much in the subsequent 30 years.

The ITU has also put up an issue of ITU News with in depth articles.

If they tried being more accurate they'd have to explain what time scale they were broadcasting way back then.

JMS had this figured out years ago with his keeper.

For over 50 years rocket launch countdowns have not run in a linear fashion, sometimes even being set backwards.

Not a lie, just missing another essential component: What I want to see is another layer of graph that shows which browsers (have) trust(ed) which CAs, and (if only!) how many dollars flowed along each of those edges.

This scenario evokes International Rescue. Obviously that says I'm old.

I remember the first vendor demo workstation arriving with X running on it. I remember GraphOn X terminals, and NCD X terminals. I remember rewriting the Keck CCD image display program not to send each image 3 times and getting live readouts over 28k modem to my living room.

except that Stanford's policy makes it clear in advance that is, basically, a tuition requirement for a degree

except that BIPM, the providers of TAI, have published this http://www.bipm.org/cc/CCTF/Allowed/18/CCTF_09-27_note_on_UTC-ITU-R.pdf wherein the CCTF "stresses that TAI is the uniform time scale underlying UTC, and that it should not be considered as an alternative time reference." This appears to indicate that the CCTF and BIPM are not comfortable with the notion that operational systems might be employing TAI as their time scale. At the end of that paper they also discuss the possibility that TAI could cease to exist.

anything that runs its kernel on GPS time can give correct UTC time by following this prescription http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/right+gps.html

The ITU doesn't insert anything, they just emit documents to which everyone is expected to conform, but the ITU-R process does not require consensus, interoperability testing, nor even a description of implementation details. All of that are Somebody Else's Problems.