I think "making an unreliable system emulate a reliable one = bad" is too simplistic a heuristic.

We do this all the time with things like ECC and retransmissions and packet recovery. This intrinsically is not bad at all, the question is: what abstraction does this expose to the higher layer.

With TCP the abstraction we expect is "pretty robust but has tail latencies, do not use for automotive networks or avionics" and that works out well. The right question IMO is always "what kind of tail behaviors does this expose, and are the consumers of the abstraction prepared for them".