It could have easily been a lot worse. It's a quirk of geography that the part of the world exactly 180 degrees from London, which just happened to be the capital of the world when the human race got around to setting up sensible time zones, happens to be a north-so-south slice of mostly unpopulated ocean, where only a few minor islands need to worry about this kind of thing.
Heck, there are a lot of possible globes where there's no sensible place to put an international date line at all... every north-south slice goes through a populated landmass.
And some of those are just our globe, rotated. (I'd give an example, but it's hard to come up with one because I don't have an actual globe that I can play around with.)
Put a pole bang in the middle of the largest landmass, Eurasia-Africa, and every line of longitude will cut through some temperate-zone habitable land.
There's one spot where you can cross the date line 3 times traveling strictly west to east and not changing your latitude!