Given that our industry has collectively shown it's unable to handle leap seconds well over decades of experience. Why not let the sectors that require a timescale closely tracking UT1 manage the complexity instead, and let the rest of us have a sensible time scale. I think you'll find that astronomers are already managing complex timescales, GPS itself doesn't have leap seconds (although it does broadcast the number of accumulated leap seconds between GPS time and UTC)
In GPS time, a second is a fixed length and days are a fixed number of seconds. By my reckoning, that means it does not have leap seconds. The UTC leap second is just another normal GPS second. The UTC leap seconds aren't disappeared as in unixtime.
Most applications of GPS time would prefer to display UTC time (since that matches most civilian uses), so the broadcast includes the offset so UTC time can be determined by the receiver.
