pancake_stacksI believe you're incorrect? The lowest TF2 can go is 0ms, there are plenty of comp servers that allow it and even standard community servers. A pub server I just joined and 0 lerp: https://i.imgur.com/WsQDNY5.png
And it's definitely not placebo. The difference is night and day for me. There is a reason why all competitive pro players are using the lowest possible lerp. Go look at the CSGO pro scene configs, or even TF2 comp scene configs. 99% are using 0 lerp.
And lastly about the hitbox argument, there are countless videos on youtube demonstrating the need to lead targets when using a higher lerp than a lower one. It's clear as day.
What degu said. net_graph doesn't show you the server bounded interp, only the initial client side calculation, which is then changed based on the server telling your client to clamp your interp. If you really had 0 interp, players would be jumping around with no continuous motion, and you should realize that if you understood what interp did.
And pro players using something doesn't mean it's correct. Many people have misunderstandings of these commands and it's just what they've been playing with for a while. Many configs have clearly bad settings all over the place, like rate 60000, which is lower than the default rate of 80000, yet many pro TF2 players use configs based on those settings.
Please show me one YouTube video where it shows you need to lead targets with hitscan. With projectiles, it is a different story, and I think any demonstration you show with negative effects will have a super high interp to show the extreme effects. But as I said, there is no adverse difference in position within a few milliseconds due to max velocities in TF2.