It's important to game with friends, and not worry about their hardware, but just theorizing why this person had different experiences with randoms on the internet versus their friend group. The common factor is their friends in this experiment
I keep the little Steam FPS counter on when I play, I never notice it making a difference when I'm with randoms vs with friends. One of my friends plays on a Steam Deck though, so the loading screen of us all diving to the planet feels like it takes ages compared to with randoms.