Considering that pretty much all multiplayer games in existence perform some sort of local prediction / state interpolation to hide the lag on the local machine, cloud only multiplayer will be considerably worse. After all you can no longer hide the lag locally, since you're not computing anything on the local machine, so the minimum precieved lag will go from 0 (for movement of your own player character) to the RT between the datacenter and your PC :/
I actually wrote a Asteroids "Clone" that uses Vector Graphics last year :) [0]
But I agree, tooling is complicated. I'm currently adding the finishing touches to the rewrite of my own Assembler / Compiler pipeline [1] and started work on a more "traditional" Metroid-like shooter, the sprite and map editor are both custom programs written in rust using imgui bindings and take care of the grunt work for generating all the data structures used in the game currently the dev efforts are 50/50 tooling/game though :D
That however goes both ways, making it also far easier to install a dictatorship etc. because you don't have to replace tens of thousands of police officers with regime loyal ones.
We're walking on razors edge here, it only takes one "election gone wrong" and we might find ourselves in a nightmare with no escape.
Plus the fact that you can't directly write to VRAM at all times and have to wait for the corresponding access windows.
But it's also a big contributor to the general art style and gameplay limitations for which the games of that generation are known for.
However with a few tricks drawing vector like graphics is possible[1] (to some degree), even though it requires a huge amount of lookup tables to be anywhere near peforment :D
Also cool to see myself featured there, so in case you need another homebrew game with access to the source try https://gitlab.com/BonsaiDen/vectroid.gb