It's way more rediculous than you think. OS network stacks try to do the reasonable thing in most cases if possible. In the case of Linux TCP Vegas is very unlikely to drop any packet since the main algorithm is RTT based not drop.

Red and hopefully codel can combat buffer bloat to some point but in the end all packets go to the same place

I see packet loss and spurious resends (lost acks) all the time on WiFi in certain locales. You are massively underplaying packet loss imo.

I think he meant the situation where the network drops a TCP segment, leading to head-of-line blocking.