In traceroute’s defense, it is traceroute — for sure it doesn’t tell you anything about the devices that don’t operate at the IP level. Those devices either don’t affect the IP “route” abstraction (e.g., signal boosters) or do so in ways that end up plausibly visible in the next hop.

There’s a reason the network layer abstraction is so strong, and an analogy to CPU ISAs here that have a similar strength.

TCP, similarly, doesn’t tell you when packets are deduplicated/resent/reordered/etc. — that’s just not part of the presented abstraction. Want that? Use UDP.