This DOES need to be put into context. It is very, VERY old, so old it even predates all modern congestion control algorithms. The timer problems were solved by Van Jacobson in 1988, who replaced the fixed beta parameter with a mathematical variance estimator, which made solved the convergence problems. The slow connection start problem was resolved using the slow-start algorithm (which ramps up exponentially). The congestion problem was solved by using exponential backoff and linear ramp-up after slow start, which solved the "retransmit storm" problem which had plagued ARPANET since the beginning. You can read about those improvements in [0], straight from Van Jacobson himself.

His scheme became known as TCP Reno, and was the basis for almost every future congestion control algorithm (CUBIC, Vegas, Chicago, Compound), until BBR (also by Van Jacobson), which operates on different principles [1].

[0]: https://ee.lbl.gov/tcp.html [1]: https://research.google/pubs/pub45646/