Did you read the article? That's what it's about. I'm actually really surprised you posted this, the whole article is about Cliqz doing a performance test and finding that the claims about ad blockers hurting performance were not true.
My own personal experiments show that even with huge rule lists, the latency incurred on the connection is barely above the noise and improves loading times on most websites by mulitple magnitudes more than it could increase latency.
Citation needed. My personal experiments show that blocking webrequest has more latency than the network connection!