Yes, that essay is outstanding! I largely left out mention of IPv6 because it's a whole different can of worms, but as that article presents, it aims to make the situation radically simpler but in practice, well, doesn't. Cue the XKCD about making a new standard.

A bit ago I touched on various competitors to IP on my blog-thing (https://computer.rip/) but I need to find time to give the topic a more thorough treatment. As with a lot of fields, you can probably learn more about what really matters in networking by studying the protocols that didn't make it than by studying the ones that did. It's hard for most people that entered the computing field in the last couple of decades to imagine IP and TCP/UDP not being the clearly correct design, but in the '80s to early '90s the expansion of microcomputers was accompanied by a flourishing of network protocols for use with them. There are multiple reasons that TCP/IP over Ethernet eventually became dominant but in the end it's mostly happenstance, it's pretty easy to imagine XNS becoming the norm if ARPANET had gone a little differently. Imagine the problems we'd be talking about today in that parallel universe, XNSv6 adoption is such a mess.

I'm honestly a bit sad to see the "all-IP" trend working its way through the telecom industry. It's reducing use of protocols like MPLS that I think are very cool. But now software-defined networking brings a whole new world of strange network technologies that we'll find ill-advised in fifty years.