yes, really. competitive gamers at the highest level have ungodly coordination and response times. this is a bit like quoting average 100m sprints for the average person and then applying that reasoning to an olympic runner.
isn't a brickwall filter going to have the lowest latency? am i missing something dumb?
That depends on implementation. There is no such thing as "brick wall" filter. They are actually all trying to be brickwall filters. To perform brickwall low pass you need infinitely long sinc as impulse response. Shorter the impulse response, shorter the delay. Transfer to the taps(order), lower order = faster. It's also true that minimum phase generally much is faster because all sound line up at the start of the impulse, the peak in time domain is around the starting point. Then with linear phase filter, you have to wait for half of the impulse response to get to the peak.
These two aspects lead to the final delay for the filter.
However filter delay is not so important. Digital nterface, driver will have higher delay measured in single digital milliseconds. But this is using ASIO with fine tuned buffer size.
With Windows audio it's going to be tens if not over 100ms delay going through the driver. So this is the main bottleneck in the condition of competitive gaming.