Not really. If you're doing a multiplayer shooter, solving the lag problem is basic. Otherwise the thing is too annoying to play.
The question is whether you can come up with something more fun than a top-down multiplayer shooter. It's not like there's a shortage of those.
For some reason, the latest fad in indy browser games seems to be parking games. Truck parking. Tank parking. Airplane parking. Crane parking. Maneuvering large vehicles around, slowly. This is at least not warmed-over 1980s console gaming.
Here's a nice piece of work in WebGL.[1] It's quite good visually, but the gameplay is buggy. It also takes minutes to load.
Solving the lag issue is only relevant when you do multiplayer over the network. At which point you are committed to a non-trivial engineering project that will take a few months of work to get off the ground. Prototyping the game idea should be done before committing to such a project.
It would be much easier to get a dozen friends with gamepads to the same room and play around with a prototype game. Just some rectangles and circles running around the screen. About 1000 lines of code at most so changes can be made on the fly. If it's not fun, iterate until it is. The turnaround time for feedback is much faster.
When I read the article I found this to be the biggest shortcoming. Starting work on a half year project with an unproven idea, no market research (playing other games with tanks and steal ideas) and a lot of technical hurdles that don't matter to the final product.
It's important to distinguish between premature optimization and unnecessary or irrelevant optimization. As many others have pointed out, the OP tunneled in on the details of netplay before there was anything to even play. He's doing the steps in a known bad order.
The question is whether you can come up with something more fun than a top-down multiplayer shooter. It's not like there's a shortage of those.
For some reason, the latest fad in indy browser games seems to be parking games. Truck parking. Tank parking. Airplane parking. Crane parking. Maneuvering large vehicles around, slowly. This is at least not warmed-over 1980s console gaming.
Here's a nice piece of work in WebGL.[1] It's quite good visually, but the gameplay is buggy. It also takes minutes to load.
[1] http://www.petigor.com