Today I had to image a raspberry pi 4 with Ubuntu 24.04 server, and I decided to pre-set the timezone to eastern standard in pi-imager. Simple stuff. Boot the pi, run apt update && apt upgrade and... it fails. Fresh install! Why? Tzdata package is broken and is refusing to fix.
The solution was estortic. I had to dig into dpkg, remove it in a way that the whole system didnt die, manually re-write the timezone files, then reinstall it.