Sending state updates every 200ms made my spidey sense tingle. Most industrial control systems of the 90s would work on continuous 200ms polling through the network. Mostly RS485 links at 9600 baud.
The thing is that this is perfectly reasonable if your network infrastructure is known. If you have fixed bandwidth and deterministic packet sizes, then you can do math and know what the behavior will be. Determinism is good! Also this assumes the network is single purpose. Which it was! For games in the 90s it was! This isn’t bad design, it was good design for the network infrastructure people would have had at the time!
Certainly true for local and/or controlled networks, however over the public internet where you're competing for bandwidth with many others over limited (and sometimes already congested-) links it's a rather questionable choice.
The thing is that this is perfectly reasonable if your network infrastructure is known. If you have fixed bandwidth and deterministic packet sizes, then you can do math and know what the behavior will be. Determinism is good! Also this assumes the network is single purpose. Which it was! For games in the 90s it was! This isn’t bad design, it was good design for the network infrastructure people would have had at the time!