Under the hood, what's happening is that the physical layer is reporting that a packet failed to decode, and the link layer is attempting retransmission at a series of lower and lower fallback rates. It's designed this way because if it fails to deliver a packet, TCP will freak out. There's an RFC about the general case of designing link layers to hide random losses: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3366
It's not so much
just because "tcp will freak out" as much as it is understanding no transport layer retransmission algorithms operating on the scale of 100+ms can be a replacement for 100us+ link layer reliability mechanisms like FEC and retransmission.
