The misusing the API did not cause anything. What it did is surface some unexpected behavior: "But calling Format on a time object, for some format strings (s

The misusing the API did not cause anything. What it did is surface some unexpected behavior: "But calling Format on a time object, for some format strings (such as time.RFC3339), needs to load this information, so will do so implicitly as a side effect. After such a call to time.Format, all time.Time structs with the time.Local location will include this info, when they didn't before. This is the kind of surprising, spooky action-at-a-distance nonsense that well-designed libraries tend to avoid. Or they at least try!" That's the actual complaint, and that behavior remains whether or not anyone calls DeepEqual.