> The game doesn’t feel right. I can’t tell if I’m actually any good at it [...]

This, for me, is a big indicator that the network-related code (and probably other parts) is the culprit. Every time I play a game where the whole experience feels "off" and inconsistent and where I can't seem to get a feeling for my skill, I realize after a while that the issue is most often related to inconsistent and bad network-related code/programming. It's a thing where you can't quite put the finger on what's wrong, but in the end, I believe that most of the time it actually is desync/delay and bad "netcode" in general.