Yes, but when you have 100 atoms and a 300ms round trip time (New Zealand to anywhere, or a satellite link in any part of the world) that's the difference between the application starting in 0.3 seconds or 30 seconds. Add a few more round trips for other stuff: 2 seconds or 32 seconds. Of course interning atoms isn't the only thing apps do on startup that is unnecessarily serialized. There could well be another 100 unnecessary round trips.
If you've ever actually tried using that configuration, you might notice that every part of every application suffers from this same problem. Almost all slowness of remote X11 used to be caused by stacking up round trip delays. Probably still is, though there's another cause now, which is transferring all the pixel data because apps treat it as a dumb pixel pipe.
This isn't a niche problem and it doesn't only affect application startup.
If you've ever actually tried using that configuration, you might notice that every part of every application suffers from this same problem. Almost all slowness of remote X11 used to be caused by stacking up round trip delays. Probably still is, though there's another cause now, which is transferring all the pixel data because apps treat it as a dumb pixel pipe.
This isn't a niche problem and it doesn't only affect application startup.