Maybe I'm in an odd corner, but I find this thing fascinating

I’d be careful not to conflate criticality with complexity. The TCP/IP stack is extremely well defined and covers a finite problem space. Products higher up the software stack tend to balloon in complexity as they reach into concrete use cases. I’m sure there are plenty of overweight teams, but most products can’t survive with 4-6 people.

> Apple has a team of at most 12 people working on TCP/IP and IPv6 Do you know who they are and how to reach them? I have filed 3 or 4 bugs with proper reproducers through Apple's feedback assistant over the years and till this day those issues haven't even received a single comment nor any acknowledgement that the report has been read.

> because AI can do it cheaper I'm interested to see how this works out in the mid-longer term to see where it tracks on the graph with "Cheaper" on one axis and "Better" on the other (where '0' is in the centre of the "Better" axis, not at the bottom/left).

This underrates contributing size a little because there's a lot more who occasionally contribute in the layers above or below - like if you're working on cellular modem performance you also care about TCP behavior, or someone working on video streaming is going to want to tune networking themselves.