Last mile latency has been reduced a lot as people moved to broadband, but also on longer distance routing where there are more paths from A to B than twenty years ago, and some of them are physically shorter. Higher bandwidth interconnects also mean less time in transit; it's not a lot, but it is some.

Also, some early broadband networks backhauled too much traffic to central locations. I recall commonly seeing traceroutes from my home in orange county, ca going to kansas, and then coming back to servers in los angeles. I still see some traffic that leaves my metro area only to come back, but it's less frequent, and it's usually only going one or two states instead of halfway across the country.