There are many problems with this article, it's for laymen so simplifies things but it's also factually incorrect. Fiber is usually next to roads or railways, which usually do not zigzag. Modern router/switches have a forwarding delay of micro/nanoseconds. The beam in a single mode fiber does not bounce like a pinball, it doesn't bounce at all, hence the name.

Ping is largely a product of distance and the speed (200km/s). It's not the distance a bird would fly but it can be close to it sometimes. And then the internet is a collection of separate networks that are not fully connected, so even if your target is in the next building your traffic might go through another bigger city as that is where the ISPs peer.

You're still missing many other significant factors besides distance. There are many conditions that affect latency, but on the minimum theoretical value possible, it's mostly dominated by the slowest path technology's single channel bandwidth. The other factors that reduce performance include:

- Network conditions

- High port/traffic oversubscription ratio

- QoS/packet service classification, i.e., discriminatory tweaks that stop, slow, or speed up certain kinds of traffic contrary to the principles of net neutrality

- Packet forwarding rate compared to physical link speed

- Network gear, client, and server tuning and (mis)configuration

- Signal booster/repeater latency

- And too many more to enumerate exhaustively

As such, point-to-point local- and internet-spanning configuration troubleshooting and optimization is best decided empirically through repeated experimentation, sometimes assisted by netadmin tools when there is access to intermediary infrastructure.