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> Unlike TLS over TCP, QUIC is still not able to be offloaded to NICs.

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.

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From a CDN perspective, whats missing is there is no kernel stack on FreeBSD / Linux, and no support for sendfile/sendpage and no support for segmentation offload entirely in hardware. So you can't just send an entire file (or a large range) and forget about it, like you can with TCP.

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.

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