A lot of gamedev networking is like this too. Half making sure your game model works in a latent environment/can be extrapolated. The other half is clever trick

A lot of gamedev networking is like this too. Half making sure your game model works in a latent environment/can be extrapolated. The other half is clever tricks(particle systems! sound effects!) to make the player think something is happening when you're just waiting to reconverge the state with an authorative response from the server.