The delay imposed by the three-way handshake makes new TCP connections expensive to create, and is one of the big reasons why connection reuse is a critical optimization for any application running over TCP.

TCP is optimized for accurate delivery, rather than a timely one

TCP provides an effective abstraction of a reliable network running over an unreliable channel, hiding most of the complexity of network communication from our applications: retransmission of lost data, in-order delivery, congestion control and avoidance, data integrity, and more