re. "...the Druids of the Internet, ..."
Do they report to the Elders of the Internet?
Users are familiar with those occasional events in which a sysadmin fat-thumb results in traffic getting deep-sixed – like, for example, this week's huge Telia outage. It's a problem that plagues the Internet and has done for years: the foundational Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) was designed in an era long-gone where sysadmins …
So, we should name the leaks instead of actually fixing the broken system which is currently in place? Yupp, it's the IETF at work again!
I'm looking at you, ROA, IRR sets and manual configuration changes. Until we are able to validate a route inside of the BGP process, we will continue to see route leaks.
Lastly: A niggly point, but Telias outage was due to an IS-IS cost, not a BGP leak.
Strangely enough, before fixing a complex problem, it's generally better to understand the details. And if it was easy to fix, it just might have been done already. And if you know how to validate a route in the general case without human eyes on it, please write the RFC immediately.