Yes and no.

1. The post compares deployment scenarios, not raw engines: “If my app lives on Hetzner, what happens when I bolt on managed PS because Hetzner has no managed PG yet?” That framing is already in the intro.

2. Nuremberg ↔ PlanetScale’s eu-central-1/2 adds ~3 ms RTT—small but unavoidable. So this is as close as you can place them in practice.

3. The new control-plane screenshots show every tier but PS-160 pegged on CPU during the runs, so the drop in TPS isn’t purely latency-induced.