The RMS of twenty years ago would have never approved of such a thing, that he has lent it the imprimatur of the FSF now is testament to his intellectual bankruptcy.

I doubt he approves now. I've not been able to find a single essay or even email from him regarding the AGPL, which is interesting considering his standard evangelism regarding other licenses. And he regards SaaS as non-free, regardless of whether the source is available.

  Is the AGPL transitive across the network the way the GPL is by linking?

There's no legal precedent (that I know of) for the GPL being transitive across dynamic linking, and if it is, that opens a number of legal problems when linking with Free implementations of proprietary APIs. Static linking is, of course, still covered under standard copyright.

From my non-lawyer reading of the AGPL, it does transit between processes and systems because it covers the output of the application.