I also have a PS5 with the PS+ Premium package, and their cloud offering is even worse.
That said, the steam deck provides a better gaming experience than a cloud gaming on a phone.
You need to think of Cloud as the mass-market play, and the enthusiasts will want to own a cloud node (Series X) in their own home. The enthusiast console market tends to top out at ~140 million people, very small compared to the number of smartphones out there.
Like is that your phone, with a controller Bluetoothed in - do you get a Bluetooth headset too? Or are you playing sound through the device speaker? Or wired through a headphone jack? Squinting at a tiny little screen in your lap? Or somehow on a stand up closer to your eyes? Do you cast your screen out to an external display or maybe pipe the video out through your charge port? Doesn’t all that murder the battery? I’m guessing you need it plugged in too? And what, you’re on wifi this whole time? Doesn’t using your smart phone as a nexus for all this put it through a wringer?
And at the end of all that, what are you doing - you’re pushing your phone to pretend it’s a gaming console? As compared to just using a low end laptop?
It’s just such an alien concept for me. Why such a tortured process to get to stream a game you don’t even own… when you could just use appropriate hardware and play a better suited game?
Since the processing isn't happening on the phone, it doesn't use much more battery than watching video.
Mobile is the predominant form of playing games these days. The goal is to allow the existing mobile players to access other types of games that won't run well natively on a phone. It's not aiming to convert existing hardcore gamers.
As compared to just using a low end laptop?
Modern phones have better screens and faster CPUs/GPUs than many low end laptops.
I get that gaming like that through a phone would suck compared to a high end gaming pc, but people don’t do that out of preference.
It's not my internet connection either, as I have my Series X hooked up with an ethernet cable, and my line is a 500/500 fiber line from Bell, with at most 5ms latency. I should be the ideal customer for cloud gaming, and it's still not good.
Playing battle toads, forza, spelunky 2, etc... I'll sometimes get visual artifacting. I even played Wo Ling and it felt as good as playing locally. When I stream, it's in my Galaxy Fold 4 so resolution doesn't matter to me on that size screen.
I also noticed a significant improvement running it on WiFi after I upgraded to a mesh network. I've only tried over cloud a few times, can appreciate connection requirements may very high, but even being able to load it up wirelessly in different parts of the house or backyard is a big plus for me.