Minority of sites have global traffic. This is especially true for non-English sites.

So, while average request may have to travel quarter (not half) of the Internet globe, median request from the set of requests that matter has much lower latency.

Barcelona to Stockholm is about 65ms, ~35ms to Amsterdam, ~43ms to Frankfurt.

HTTP/3 is ubiquitous, you don’t get TCP handshake penalty anymore in major browsers.