I haven't been in a workflow where tramp is useful to me in a while. I recall it was borderline magical back when I did use it. I'm assuming it is highly reliant on how good your network connection is?
Definitely has more config now than I recall. Kudos on benchmarking the different settings here. I'm definitely curious to see what sort of stuff gets tried to make it even more seamless.
Just thought about this for a second and it made me sad: I haven't SSH'd into a machine in at least a couple of years at this point. Everything works through web frontends, git, CI/CD, Terraform etc. Actually editing a file on a server instead of treating everything as amorphous ephemeral compute would be a real guilty pleasure!
There's very little if any config that is strictly necessary. I used to use TRAMP quite a bit and I never configured anything. Of course like all emacs packages you can config and tweak it to your heart's content.
Definitely has more config now than I recall. Kudos on benchmarking the different settings here. I'm definitely curious to see what sort of stuff gets tried to make it even more seamless.