[TheDong]

Coal power obviously doesn't suck as its pretty much powered the planet for the last 100 years.

It's perfectly possible for something to both be incredibly popular and to suck. An appeal to popularity is certainly not better than a click-bait headline.

I'd argue that most of the stuff we use sucks in some ways as well; suck isn't an absolute term. TCP sucks in very specific ways the article talks about.

[nine_k]

It's not just popularity; it's an adaptable enough design to work in the range from 150 baud acoustic modem links to 40 Gbit fiber optics. Not many designs can withstand that, no matter how hard people try.

[berbec]

I'd suggest an update to your lower bound - avian carrier

[the8472]

To my knowledge that has only ever been deployed to send ICMP messages, not TCP. With a TCP stack tuned to give more lenient timeouts it might work but you'll need a lot more trips to do a whole connection setup and teardown.