What are the potential pitfalls of manually calculating time differences in PHP?

When manually calculating time differences in PHP, potential pitfalls include not accounting for daylight saving time changes, leap years, and different time zones. To accurately calculate time differences, it is recommended to use built-in PHP functions like `DateTime` and `DateInterval` which handle these complexities automatically.

$date1 = new DateTime('2022-01-01 12:00:00');
$date2 = new DateTime('2022-01-02 08:30:00');

$interval = $date1->diff($date2);

echo $interval->format('%H hours %i minutes');