You couldn’t be bothered to read the paper I just linked to could you?
It has
- Formal specification
- Consensus proof for Tendermint.
- A complete bibliography.
Of course the Gossip model vs the TCP model matters, PBFT models a network topology where all the nodes are directly connected to each other. The consensus protocol can provide the fault detection and recovery instead of doing it at the transport layer.
Tendermint works in a model where there is a heterogeneous mix of validator nodes and full nodes in the network. Under normal conditions, we don’t expect to have any sort of direct network link between validators nodes. Validators nodes are also gossiping about many things other than consensus like new transactions, evidence of Byzantine Faults etc. It make sense to only have one p2p layer for all that.
Tendermint also is designed to operate over the internet not enterprise networks. This means our communication protocols need to be as friendly to middleboxes as possible. While it is possible to deploy new internet scale UDP protocols like QUIC, Google has been working on this for years and run into numerous challenges. There is certainly room for improvements in our network stack but you are approaching this from entirely the wrong angle.