The problem with wifi, in a crowded environment, is the lost packets from the crowding. Which you allude to here:
> As with many city homes, there are many overlapping networks
Every single wifi network other than your own is a source of interference for yours, and interference impacts latency first, then when the interference gets bad enough, throughput is impacted.
You can paper over the issues with stronger signals, for a time, until the density of the surrounding networks grows (or others begin strengthening their signals because your stronger signals are now causing them excessive interference). But you can never escape the interference without moving somewhere very rural where you are the only wifi close enough to detect.
You can escape some of the wireless interference by switching to 5G wireless (much shorter range, so fewer other 5G wireless networks will be in range to cause interference and a much larger number of channels, so fewer collisions), but then you have to be operating within that shorter range of your own AP, which could again mean running some ethernet to bring the transmitters closer to where you need them to be to operate reliably.
> As with many city homes, there are many overlapping networks
Every single wifi network other than your own is a source of interference for yours, and interference impacts latency first, then when the interference gets bad enough, throughput is impacted.
You can paper over the issues with stronger signals, for a time, until the density of the surrounding networks grows (or others begin strengthening their signals because your stronger signals are now causing them excessive interference). But you can never escape the interference without moving somewhere very rural where you are the only wifi close enough to detect.
You can escape some of the wireless interference by switching to 5G wireless (much shorter range, so fewer other 5G wireless networks will be in range to cause interference and a much larger number of channels, so fewer collisions), but then you have to be operating within that shorter range of your own AP, which could again mean running some ethernet to bring the transmitters closer to where you need them to be to operate reliably.