> (Exactly how fine / is that violating some common expectations and will cause problems: I dunno. Not familiar enough with IPFS's internals)

I felt the article addressed that a bit further down. 20 copies is a somewhat arbitrary knob in the Kademlia DHT design IPFS is based on and this lab's research suggested that 15 was probably closer to good enough for GET requests to succeed at about the same time cost. Rather than dropping the knob for the entire DHT, because redundancy is always useful in the long run they went with the Early Return and a secondary process called the Reprovide Sweep that still tries to push the network towards the 20 live copies minimum it desires.

I'm assuming the Reprovide Sweep was work previously done/documented because it seems like something that might have been more interesting to discuss at longer length in relevant parts of the article.