What is the benefit to setting your Linux servers to UTC, especially if your local time is not UTC ?

It seems more beneficial to set your servers to the time where the physical servers are located.

Or perhaps make the server time the same as your local time, no matter what timezone the server is in ? Just set the hardware and software clock to EST when actually server is in
PDT, Mountain or Japan ? Server does not care where it is. If the server is using a different clock than the ISP provider...I dont see a problem with that.

It is annoying to translate servers between UTC and server time and especially so when
tracing a bug issue.

When servers may be scattered across multiple time zones, setting them to UTC simplifies syncing and maintenance from a centralized administrative location.

The Arch Wiki has an excellent article on this: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Time#Time_standard

As hinted above, if all your servers are in one timezone, then using that timezone would be fine.
However, if they are scattered across >1 timezone, then one way or another you're going to have to deal with it, either by using a common TZ or running them on local TZs and then rationalizing the records during processing.
Your choice ...