The author showed up in the hackernews comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46367475 for the post, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46372060 for the author's comment.

Apparently their corporate context is inside kubernetes and prevents UDP. Personally I don't know enough to say whether they're just ignorant, lazy, or they have "valid" constraints.

But yeah, didn't tmux solve this problem a few decades ago, already?