I've been trying to convince them to try Starlink, but they're unwilling to pay for the $500+ equipment costs.
One of my neighbors is apparently using Starlink since I see a Starlink router show up in my Wi-Fi scan.
Many people have already said designing for iffy internet helps everyone: this is true for slimming your payload, but not necessarily designing around dropped connections. On a plane or train, you might alternate between no internet and good internet, so you can just retry anything that failed when the connection is back, but a rural connection can be always spotty. And I think the calculus for devs isn't clearly positive when you have to design qualitatively new error handling pathways that many people will never use.
For example, cloning a git repo is non-resumable. Cloning a larger repo can be almost impossible since the probability the connection doesn't drop in the middle falls to zero. The sparse checkout feature has helped a lot here. Cargo also used to be very hard to use on rural internet until sparse registries.