Yes, like I said you're conflating MSS clamping with all kinds of other things. That's incorrect. Remove the MSS clamping from your example, and the outcome is

Yes, like I said you're conflating MSS clamping with all kinds of other things. That's incorrect. Remove the MSS clamping from your example, and the outcome is exactly the same. MSS clamping by a middlebox is a totally fine practice. Dropping ICMP packets is a bad practice. But they have nothing to do with each other. They're probably not even being done by the same device.