I don’t think it’s necessarily horrible but with slow WAN speeds it might be worth it to set up a DNS caching server and potentially caching proxies for whatever services you use (this used to be easier for generic HTTP before encryption).
For example, macOS has Content Caching for caching Apple software updates. You can also cache repositories for several Linux distributions, Docker, stuff like that too.
I’d love to add something original to this post, but you’ve pretty much covered it.
To your point about corporate overlords: many of us loved Reddit until we realized it was a cesspool (for any number of reasons) and moved on, and it’s almost a shameful thing to admit we ever liked Reddit at this point.
To put it more simply: we just love federation and we love the format. We could always jump ship to Mastodon or any other federated platform, but long form discussion is what I believe drives adoption of Lemmy in particular the most.