Direct at the speed of light (almost)!
No.
Analog copper signals are TERRIBLE. A big reason telecom was one of the first to embrace digital transmissions was due to all the quality issues of copper.
Yes, latency was low, but that was about the only thing going for it.
To get a clear signal over copper you NEED a very large amount of insulation, and that insulation needs to be through the entire circuit. Just one section with frayed plastic, ran too close to a powerline, or is passing under a thunderstorm would introduce all sorts of noise onto the line. The longer the distance, the bigger a problem this was.
Sure, some calls might have been clear, but a lot were utterly terrible.
Of course, this only applied until I tried to make an overseas call - then it sounded like I was calling Mars.
If you go watch an old TV show with a long distance phone call (Comes up on MASH, for example, and the Twilight zone). You'll see people screaming into the phones. That was a pretty normal way to be heard as whispers simply couldn't be heard. Sending out a really strong vocal signal made it easier to hear that over the noise and pops.
As an example, one game phone phreaks in the 70s would play is stacking very long lines back and forth. Route a call across the country, then back, then back again. You could do NY - SF four or five times with a circuit length of like 10,000 miles sometimes before the channel was unusable.
You are otherwise totally right about the potential distortion of a long distance analog circuit. Other times filters would be out of tune and you would hear the hundreds of other analog channels just murmuring in the background not quite discernible, and calling the next town over was almost impossible.
Screaming into the phone was more the pre-electronics era with carbon microphones. The original analog phone systems had no active amplification at all. Voice powered microphones were typical in the military until quite late - I think they still use them as backups on ships.
TAT-7 - 4000 analog 3 kHz channels over coaxial, laid 1983
TAT-8 - 280 Mbit/s over fibre optic, laid 1988
East Coast of the US to London, UK, in the early 1980s. Over three thousand miles. Quite expensive. Quality was dreadful.
He's being hyperbolic of course, since there's people in their 90s and 100s who made phone calls way back when you had to talk to the operator to place a long-distance call. But the general point is valid: how many people here actually remember the days when the connection was all-analog? You would have had to be making LD calls in the 1970s probably.