How well does this work with lossy compression? I would trust only lossless formats and analog with digital data encoded as audio, but I have zero hands-on experience with this
XP wasn't that early. IDE worked out of the box. But if you had a RAID setup or something else that needed a driver (early SATA?) you could load the driver there
If you do want to learn about pipelines, or want a more powerful breadboard computer without 6502 you should check out James Sharman[1] on YouTube. He has VGA and audio output too.
[1] https://youtube.com/@weirdboyjim
Why? If you use only 1.1 features on a 2.0 platform it would work just like on 1.1 but faster. If you're on a USB1.1 platform and want to use a 2.0 feature you could just use a 2.0 platform without any changes to the existing code
If it's to the nearest IXP the ISP could create it's own IXP and measure latency to that. So it should be to not just any IXP, but a well-connected one