It conjures images of classical ‘edge compute’ use cases like the self driving cars in the article. Those use cases tend to be exceptionally specialized (or just silly).
Yes. You do not do hard real time over the public Internet.
(I've actually had the experience of driving a full-sized vehicle over WiFi. When we built our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle in 2004, we had the test capability of driving it remotely over WiFi, from a control station with a game steering wheel and pedals. Worked fine technically, difficult to drive. 100ms of no signal and the stall timer slammed on the brakes. Self-driving in the "cloud" is not where you want to go.)