The full quote of that premature optimization trope is this:

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%"

People often ignore that second half.

> "I mean how many live on a 10 Mbps home connection with high latency yet they make perfectly fine calls."

I'm not sure I agree with 'perfectly fine', people just suffer through things being terrible because they don't know they could be better. Latency on a 1:1 call is bad, but tolerable - things get a lot worse as you move towards group interaction (dealing with group video chats often because of covid it's clear how much worse this is than in a real life room).

It's not premature optimization to get the latency down when that's probably the most critical feature tied to usable performance and better experience, arguably everything else should be lower priority.

We may have experienced different kinds of latency but in my experience i havent noticed much of an issue when using chat vr. I may be biased as i am keen on vr going mainstream and looking back at the times of dialup i cant help but wonder what would happened if we waited for fiber optic before using the internet, because it was laggy. So it may suck for a while but its just fine - no worse than a laggy skype call 5 years ago.