A different continent is usually a few hundred milliseconds away. (The worst delay I had in my life was between me in Europe and the target machines in Japan, and the round-trip still was about a second.)

The response time of an under-provisioned or poorly implemented API endpoint on a machine in the same rack can be multiple seconds though :(

an edge case you can come up with != typical experience. What you're saying is not far fetched, but also not the common case, especially at home and it's not like this latency only occurs on RADII networks