No, the overhead is fairly minimal. A 5% packet loss (which is very bad) on a gigabit link where the sender is thousands of miles away might have an effective t

No, the overhead is fairly minimal. A 5% packet loss (which is very bad) on a gigabit link where the sender is thousands of miles away might have an effective throughput of 930 mbits per second with RaptorQ. With regular TCP you would get only a few megabits/s, as it would back down until the loss rate was nearly zero.