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Imagine if handling that were a kernel feature completely hidden from you and there was no way to replace it in user mode, or even have visibility into its failure modes. I'd say that's worse.

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Telling the socket the IDENTITY of the host you want to reach and abstracting away all the details of how to reach it is exactly what the missing TCP/IP sessions layer is supposed to do. By tightly coupling the session layer to explicit Layer 3 network routing parameters (IP addresses), the classic socket API failed to separate a host's identity from its physical location.

Questions of identity are established at a higher level in user mode by TLS. Pushing all that into the other side of the kernel interface again seems not great.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locator/Identifier_Separation_...

I've used this in networks and it enables amazingly easy endpoint mobility.

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