> It feels like it shouldn't be possible nor work as well as it does, and yet apparently I'm having a much better experience than people with much more capable hardware.

I often use screen sharing to work on my laptop from my desktop. Both machines are connected to the same switch with gigabit ethernet, but it performs worse and has more noticable input lag than the Stadia games I'm playing over the internet. It must have something to do with the video encoding I guess, Google doing things in hardware and my laptop trying it's best in software.