If they are like Riot and have their own fiber, it is not unlikely. There are tons of boring optimizations open source software also won't bother with without significant sponsorship (some could be specific to a particular file format). If you look at most network (and also video) protocols, they are accumulations of decades of improvements rather than neural network style overnight breakthroughs.
MIT open courseware has a course on Performance Engineering which details some of the types of low level optimizations that can be done. It requires a lot of measuring and problem specific solutions.
I’ve helped with that course in the past. It’s awesome. It’s completely unrelated to WAN networking. I found the IETF groups working on these problems more helpful.
