As far as I can tell, eg by the extremely slow speed of the Stripe dashboard from Europe, even the most "modern" companies struggle to get their data close enou

As far as I can tell, eg by the extremely slow speed of the Stripe dashboard from Europe, even the most "modern" companies struggle to get their data close enough to the users that network latency no longer matters. It's a lovely ideal but I know few companies that have achieved it. Sure, edge computing is a thing but if all the edge workers still need to go to some read replica database at least half a continent away, then in the end the 1+N requests the author suggests aren't going to get you very far.