this article is informative but misleading. i do the testing at a big ISP (your packets go over us for at least something). we test traceroute. we complain to vendors when traceroute doesn't work right. we do investigate weird traceroutes.
its not just about what you're connected to, but what the other side is and how the things work out to get it in between. SE asia is an important area for some large ISPs.
> It is, generally speaking, not possible to call AT&T and say "Hey, when I try to ping one of your subscribers in California from a Level3 circuit in New York, I'm hitting a routing loop."
I’ve reported similar things to my isp and they’ve changed their lock prefs to send the traffic via a different peer and bypass the problem.
There are more private subscribers that pretend they know what they’re talking about than actually do. Probably makes sense to ignore a good proportion of the nonsense people throw at ISP L1 teams.