I believe, based on my own experiences, that you're mistaken here.
MacOS has a nice feature that shows you in the device tree what the thunderbolt connection speed is, for my eGPU it shows as '2x' which is 20GBps, and that's running an eGPU with 2x 4k displays.
For work, I run a 4k panel from Lenovo[0] that has a USB-C in and while that's a 60Hz screen, it does not show any signs of input lag or artifacting.