I'm not defending this but should all games really be as responsive as possible, is it really that bad when they don't and can it affect realism?
They should be as responsive as possible. Folks should remember that responsiveness is not what actually defines whether something feels incredibly fast and precise or slow and heavy.
Remember that there is already human delay in the input chain. You are already pressing buttons some number of frames later than whatever your brain saw or heard that caused you to press that button. You do not ever need to account for this delay in-engine.
Now, if you want to try and have your game feel heavier, slower, more realistic, you can do this by adjusting what the response to the button input is. It's software, you can make it do whatever you want. You don't need to insert an artificial gap between receiving an input and doing something with it, it will only create unwanted dissonance in the input chain.
Just to clarify, that seems to be a typo and he seems to have meant 10-16 frames.
https://twitter.com/danlowlows/status/1059146652152262656
Which is still very bad and way beyond the 5-6 frames that only the most sensitive people can notice.
I'm still really surprised it was basically never mentioned in the various reviews.
Okay... that's slightly better than what he originally said, but it's still a 6 frame variance gap in a 30 FPS game, when the floor is already such an absurdly high result. So it's still a butt ugly range of like ~333ms to ~532ms. Those are just plain insane numbers.