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I just learned about traceroute and couldn't figure out why it's so useful: A packet over the internet can take different routes each time a packet is sent from a source to the same destination.

So then if you run traceroute wouldn't you just be finding out one of the possible paths it could take? If so, why is that useful ?

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  • Just because a packet can have many paths doesn't mean it necessarily will. The internet is not a massive spaghetti of overlapping connections. While there's usually more than one path higher up in the tree, routing protocols generally only select one. Within a providers network, there may be some parallel redundancy.
    – Ricky
    Commented Oct 1, 2022 at 22:33

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Traceroute is a useful tool on your own network where you know how traffic should travel. You can use it to test and troubleshoot problems on your network, e.g. discover where a routing problem is.

it is not actually trustworthy on a network you do not own. Some ISPs look for traceroute packets and reroute them in order to prevent casual network discovery. Running traceroute on the public Internet, where packets travel through multiple ASes, is a fool's game.

You seem to be looking at this from a home routing (off-topic) perspective. Many businesses (on-topic) have very large networks, and traceroute is a useful tool to have in the toolbox of a network engineer.

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