The framing of the article --- the article is fine, it's a good piece --- is weird to me because one of the original marquee use cases for XDP was for hosting providers, where virtuals are connected to physicals by way of tap interfaces, where you have to reason about the rx/tx path to do XDP at all. It's not that the article is bad, it just creates the impression that there's something weird or nonnormative about what they did, when, again, I think there's literally an xdp-tutorial example of this.

"Go ahead and do stuff like this and don't worry about whether it's a 'loophole' is I guess my whole point".