Fidonet worked and many an offshoot were spawned.

I fondly remember conversations on AmiNet - an Amiga - dedicated FTN network.

That was all done over PSTN with 9600 - 19200 bps modems. Latency was days. All this didn't preclude massive amounts of collaboration over it.

I'd rather question if lower latency delivers any benefit.

Yet, notably, copyrighted material meant for human consumption is exactly the kind of content that aligns best with high throughput/extreme latency scenarios.