I haven't used FUSE SSHFS in around 8 years. I'm sure it has improved a lot since then. I could imagine it handling file listing and stat better than other network protocols (cd/ls over ssh works well over most WAN connections). It looks like it now caches directly contents too (https://github.com/libfuse/sshfs). It probably wasn't fair for me to include SSHFS in the list since I haven't used it in so long. I was troublesome when I used it.