It makes perfect sense in this context of graphics software. You're forgetting that computer graphics are a heap of latency issues.

"I said, ‘No, that can’t be so, Larry,’ ” Eno recalled. “ ‘We’ve all worked to that track, so it must be right.’ But he said, ‘Sorry, I just can’t play to it.’ ” Eno eventually adjusted the click to Mullen’s satisfaction, but he was just humoring him. It was only later, after the drummer had left, that Eno checked the original track again and realized that Mullen was right: the click was off by six milliseconds. “The thing is,” Eno told me, “when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat, and he said, ‘No, you’ve got to come back a bit.’ Which I think is absolutely staggering.”"

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilia...

Reaction time is not really relevant for musicians, they are more like operating on a continuous feedback loop with the sound and the instrument, so the sensitivity to latency is much higher. Afaik most good instruments aim to well below 10ms latencies.

And yes, digital audio typically inherently has some latency due processing typically being based on some buffers. Sure, you can try to make those buffers smaller but that is not always so easy to do.

This statement does make sense in the realm of audio processing. Moving from analog to TDM Digital, to Packetized Digital audio does add latency. Compare an analog radio (either two way or broadcast) without any digital signal processing, with a analog one with signal processing, to a digital one - each step in there, the latency goes longer.

On a full duplex phone call, you can tolerate quite a bit of latency, upwards of 600ms, provided there is no echo, as soon as echo is present, we notice the latency - but even on echo free calls, the longer the latency, the more likely both parties will end up speaking at the same time.

Musicians can detect latency as little as 1ms. It changes the "feel" of the instrument/equipment. It took until recently for digital gear to feel similar to analog, because it's an enormous engineering challenge to get digital equipment to be as responsive as the simplest analog equipment.