I don’t know what’s your beef against Apple but the alarm clock does use a local time (though there have been (unacceptable) bugs leading to incorrect wake up time due to DST).

I may misremember as it happened years ago. I thought it was the alarm clock but it's possible that it was an event reminder for an appointment that went off at the incorrect local time.

Those bugs are the leaked implementation detail that the alarm clock does in fact store the time zone internally.