Everything I've read about the lock-step approach is that it is a total nightmare to develop - keeping games deterministic is really hard and a de-sync bug that

Everything I've read about the lock-step approach is that it is a total nightmare to develop - keeping games deterministic is really hard and a de-sync bug that happens out the blue after 1 hour of 4-player multiplayer is the kind of thing that is extremely difficult to get to the bottom of. Streaming everything is by comparison much easier to develop in my view since that class of problems disappears. It also allows late-joining, including spectators, as it syncs the full state of the game periodically, and it makes it resistant to brief network outages, such as going through a tunnel on a train while on cell data. I think it's also worth sometimes revisiting the assumptions made for the current algorithms and approaches in use. The original design was for dial-up modems. The networking landscape is completely different now. Maybe some of the original assumptions are no longer valid and a different set of tradeoffs is worthwhile.