If these were necessary, why aren't they mentioned in BEP0005 or hardcoded in Libtorrent?

Also, take mainline crate, and replace the routing table with this node; relay.pkarr.org:6981 see what happens.

Also, once you bootstrap, call to_bootstrap() to cash your table to disk for next sessions, and use that for bootstraping and see what happens.

Come on now.