Why does traceroute reach destination in spite of intermediate hop timeouts?

Question

When traceroute times out on intermediate hops, how is it able to continue on to the destination as follows?

[root@localhost network-scripts]# traceroute -I  www.google.com
traceroute to www.google.com (216.58.196.228), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  gateway (10.0.2.2)  0.531 ms  0.355 ms  0.448 ms
 2  * * *
 3  * * *
 4  osk009nasgw111.IIJ.Net (202.32.116.129)  366.682 ms  366.562 ms  366.368 ms
 5  osk004bb01.IIJ.Net (202.32.116.5)  366.206 ms  366.062 ms  365.879 ms
 6  osk004ix50.IIJ.Net (58.138.107.166)  363.375 ms  125.516 ms  125.391 ms
 7  210.130.133.86 (210.130.133.86)  125.574 ms  125.520 ms  137.085 ms
 8  108.170.243.65 (108.170.243.65)  137.103 ms  137.491 ms  137.364 ms
 9  108.170.238.93 (108.170.238.93)  138.227 ms  138.147 ms  101.212 ms
10  kix06s01-in-f4.1e100.net (216.58.196.228)  100.566 ms  100.791 ms  235.679 ms

Answer 1

Answering my own question here.

The servers in the middle can reject ICMP requests, but will still pass along packets to the next server once the TTL is incremented for subsequent transmissions.