No man, it's a deliberate look which sacrifices readability for some kind of retro-aesthetic whether they admit it or not. It's easy enough to reference things

No man, it's a deliberate look which sacrifices readability for some kind of retro-aesthetic whether they admit it or not. It's easy enough to reference things by section numbers. And really, if they cared about being able reference things to the n-th degree, the figures would have been captioned and have their own figure-number instead of just sort-of "in there" like a paragraph (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8200.html#section-4.4 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8200.html#section-4.4).