Agreed that it's a problem but probably not a huge one today on the internet since most loss is actually a result of congestion. It has led to some weird thing

Agreed that it's a problem but probably not a huge one today on the internet since most loss is actually a result of congestion. It has led to some weird things whereby the L2 protocols (thinking wifi and LTE/cellular) have their own reliability layer to combat the problem you're describing. I'm not sure if things would be better or worse if they didn't do this and TCP was responsible, the iteration of solutions for it would be much slower and probably could never be as good as the current situation where the network presents a less-lossy layer to TCP. We have to completely rethink things for interplanetary networking. I thought I recognized your username, I remember jailbreaking the original iPhone on IRC with you helping :)