I only tested it in lan, and it works great. Not sure if it works online, too. You may need hamachi.
And of course: online multiplayer with randos is probably not worth it, as others have pointed out. On one hands it's probably a bitch to set up. On the other cheating is probably rampant.
I thought the temporal improvement would be for everyone who already used the high way (because they will get to their destination a little bit faster). And for the few extra people, who start to use the highway but didn't use it before, the improvment will stay.
we’ll probably get a win 12 that is less good than win 10, but better than win 11,
I wouldn't count on it. MS is moving away from selling desktop-stuff and towards selling cloud stuff (think azure and office356) and consulting. That's why they changed their attitude towards linux (think wsl and c# for linux) and open-source (think github). MS wants companies to use open-source tools (preferably written in c#) and deploy them to azure with the help of MS-consultants.
Enshittifying windows is a step in that direction. For example: The more people have a MS-Account, the easier it is to sell office356. That's why they pressure windows-user into making MS-Accounts.
inkscape is on a level with illustrator (maybe even better)
for drawing: try krita
if you want to pay money (much much less than for adobe): Affinity is on a level with fotoshop