Author here; I think I understand where you might be coming from. I find functional nature of R combined with pipes incredibly powerful and elegant to work with.
OTOH in a pipeline, you're mutating/summarising/joining a data frame, and it's really difficult to look at it and keep track of what state the data is in. I try my best to write in a way that you understand the state of the data (hence the tables I spread throughout the post), but I do acknowledge it can be inscrutable.
The direct peering to the router is likely going to have a bad time, but route advertisement interval I mention in the article is going to coalesce all of those updates together. Downstream peers would only see the one update every 30 seconds (or so).
First off, the HTTP HTTP 301s to the HTTPS site, so HTTPS is still the likely trigger.
Second, I see that whatever client he's using is specifying a very old TLS 1.0. If its not MTU (which others have mentioned), then my guess would be a firewall with a policy specifying a minimum TLS version, and dropping this connection on the floor.