In practice if you have a very high ping, you're losing packets or there's buffering somewhere. Not because you have a 30,000 km long ethernet cable.

We used to play these games on dial-up where ~300ms pings were pretty common.

Moving to a cable connection in ~2001 was shocking in comparison!

When Quake(world) was released, it was common to play games on dial-up modems, where 250+ milliseconds was a normal ping time. If you played on a distant server, you could easily get over 500 milliseconds or even much worse.

Geostationary satellite internet has garbage pings too.

Unless you are playing Quake through Iridium.