>If this is changed, some decades-old systems, some of which may be critical infrastructure, may have to be substantially modified to account for leap seconds in some other way. The mention of GLONAS in the article is one such example.

GLONAS and other GPS like systems already have to deal with the temporal effects of special AND general relativity in their time keeping. Pushing leap seconds off on to the already special case system seems like a fair trade for making every other programmer and sysadmins life easier. let the extreme corner cases deal with their problems not everyone else.