[hot_gril]

You could probably build something better than what the AoE2 remake has now. I don't know if it'd be viable in 1998, though. Wasn't like today's constantly self-updating games; each patch risked fragmenting the community, and they only released like 2 patches across 15 years of activity. They chose something simple that'd work well enough without having to tweak it. And old PC specs, and no dedicated servers. You said it's better to disadvantage laggers than to punish everyone, but that requires some balancing to ensure it's fair enough. AoE model is always fair and can be lag-free.

Yes it relies on the players trusting each other a little to avoid extreme lag, but there are plenty of ways to ruin this kind of game besides lagging. It's not like CoD where a few useless teammates won't make a big difference, while it didn't have automated ranked play like Csgo. (but the recent DE remake does, and yes it needs better netcode)

Time-traveling netcode... I know Slippi does this, and it works great.