You are correct about ESnet. Before I quit LANL last year, I ran traceroute from my LANL desktop to my house. I found that the packets went through Sunnyvale. If LANL is serious about WFH, they will address that.
Terry Wallace was amenable to a direct connection in town, but the determination of whether fiber losses were excessive was left to that now-Lumen contractor, and somehow, yes those losses just didn't come up to snuff. It might have been a problem for 10 gig, but we were only trying to set up 1 gig, and the county was planning to tear down the "annex" near the Smith's gas station and destroy the route for the fiber anyway. Which the county did.