Yes, BBRv1 has fairness issues when used at scale vs certain other algorithms. No, that doesn't mean people finding it tunes their performance 5x in a particular use case with high latency and some loss should stop talking about how it helps in that scenario. YouTube ran it without the internet burning to the ground so using it in these niche kinds of cases with personal tuning almost certainly results in a net good even though the algorithm wasn't perfect. BBRv3 will make it scale to everyone with better fairness for sure but BBR is still much better behaving for fairness than almost any UDP stream anyways.
The original cargo cultists built runways on islands to cause supplies to be dropped off. It didn't work. If someone copy and pasted something they don't fully understand off the Internet, but it works, can you really blame them for it, or call them cargo cultists?
It's easy to coax BBR into converging on using 20% of a shared link instead of 50% (cohabiting with one other stream).
The inverse is true and it's easy to get BBR to hog 80% of a link instead of 50% (cohabiting with one other stream). If you're happy for other people to steal bandwidth from you with greedy CCAs then go ahead and ratelimit yourself. I'm not.
It's still useful when dealing with high-latency links with non-zero loss. Fine, something might outcompete it, but without it the throughput would suck anyway.
E.g. if a service runs on a single server (no CDN) and you occasionally get users from Australia then the site will by a bit laggy for them but at least it won't be a trickle.
Please stop. BBRv1 is broken and should not be used on the open internet.
This sort of copy-paste cargo-cult performance tuning (just set a magical value and things will be better) is the exact opposite of what TFA is about.
Thankfully Google are upstreaming BBRv3 so this will be over soon.