Hey CoolBeans!

You're on the right track here - if it's not on the final hop, you don't need to worry about it. Basically, the short of it is that the devices throwing that loss are down-prioritizing ICMP TTL expired requests, which are what intermediate hops get. However, they're still passing packets fine - hence the final hop looking alright.

You can check out this article for a bit more information:

https://www.pingman.com/kb/article/packet-loss-or-latency-at-intermediate-hops-24.html

Let me know if you have any questions!