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Speaking of networking older games, I think the "TRIBES Engine Networking Model" is also an interesting read. Managing ~128 players over the internet in a single game back in the late 90's was no mean feat. A lot of these kinds of optimizations are still greatly applicable even today!

https://www.gamedevs.org/uploads/tribes-networking-model.pdf

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I'm a Tribes 1 and 2 vet. I think the largest games I played were still capped at 64 people. It was definitely some impressive network code, for sure. Latency was still a huge issue, but what really helped that game out was the fact that it basically required being able to accurately predict everything yourself. You constantly had to predict how high up you could jetpack, when to initiate the jetpack, where you should land on a slope, where you should jump from, where to shoot "ahead" to get "mid-air" shots (shooting people in the air as they're jetting past you at incredible speeds). This act of priming oneself to the game's fast-paced environment made the latency far more tolerable than it probably would have been.

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