It's not just popularity; it's an adaptable enough design to work in the range from 150 baud acoustic modem links to 40 Gbit fiber optics. Not many designs can withstand that, no matter how hard people try.
To my knowledge that has only ever been deployed to send ICMP messages, not TCP. With a TCP stack tuned to give more lenient timeouts it might work but you'll need a lot more trips to do a whole connection setup and teardown.
