I grew up in the UK in the 80s & 90s, which seems to be the period he was really becoming huge in the US, and I had never heard of him until he died a couple of years ago.
I've had similar problems in the past - apparently no internet connection, and both times I narrowed it down to the machine being unable to resolve domain names.
Turns out Tailscale had changed the IP address for the machines' DNS resolution in resolv.conf to 100.100.100.100
That's fine when the machine is connected to Tailscale but not when it isn't!
Reverting the DNS IP back to whatever it was previously, or to something like 1.1.1.1 solved the problem for me, at least to the extent that it could resolve URLs again.
Worth a look, if only to rule it out...?
Where I live (New South Wales, Australia) the official way for cyclists to traverse junctions like this is to stop/slow down about where the back of the red car is, do a 90 degree turn to the right and cross the on-ramp - either cycling or walking - perpendicular to the direction of traffic, then get going again down the "far" side of the on-ramp (from the perspective of this image.)
Not perfect because unless there's nothing coming down the ramp at all you still have to slow down/lose momentum if not actually stop, but definitely preferable to becoming a human zipper between two lanes of merging cars travelling three times faster than you are.
Same with the miniature furniture they give you in pizza boxes. I only ever seem to get the tables.