Latency isn't just a static number bolted on to baseline performance. While it may intuitively feel correct to say "if distance adds 100ms to every request, then a website with 200ms baseline performance would be 33% slower, but a website with 5000ms baseline performance would only be 2% slower"; its not. Its additive. A typical website like reddit will require hundreds if not thousands of requests to prop up the home page; many of these requests cascade in batches, their inputs being dependent on the output of the other; so, adding on 100ms to every request can very realistically mean the addition of 1-2s of load time, on a site that's already slow because its poorly engineered.

There are newer web technologies and methodologies to help get around some of these problems that request cascades have. React itself, on the other hand, in how it loads children, then children of children, oftentimes conditionally based on data availability, has made the problem worse. There's also CDNs, and more recently, edge-local compute like CF Workers. The emergence of all of these technologies to help triage the problems geographic centrality in service deployments creates should be all the evidence you need to change your mind that this is a real problem.

But, it will remain a problem, because much like passwords to passkeys: It takes a very long time to clear out the calcification that's been built up in our human and computer systems. Not only does it require a shift in how we think about systems design; it requires convincing people like you that this is, in fact, a problem; people who may have not left town for years, not experienced the internet from the other side of the globe. Ashburn VA is ~2500 miles from the west coast of the US; ~4000 miles from Europe, Hawaii, or Alaska; and ~11,000 miles from Perth, Australia or Jakarta. Yes; the US is that large, and the world is that large; your experience in Europe is barely different than what a person living in California would experience, on a site that centralizes itself in us-east-1. There's a lot more distance to cover once you move out of the West.