QUIC is real and works great, and they sidestepped all of that and just built it and tuned it and has basically won. As for QUIC "sending more parts of the page in parallel" yes thats what I referred to re head of line blocking in TCP.
Unlike TLS over TCP, QUIC is still not able to be offloaded to NICs. And most stacks are in userspace. So it is horrifically expensive in terms of watts/byte or cycles/byte sent for a CDN workload (something like 8x as a expensive the last time I looked), and its primarily used and advocated for by people who have metrics for latency, but not server side costs.
That's not quite true. You can offload QUIC connection steering just fine, as long as your NICs can do hardware encryption. It's actually _easier_ because you can never get a QUIC datagram split across multiple physical packets (barring the IP-level fragmentation).
The only real difference from TCP is the encryption for ACKs.
Some NICs, like Broadcom's newer ones, support crypto offloads, but this is not enough to be competitive with TCP / TLS. Especially since support for those offloads are not in any mainline kernel in Linux or BSD.