Just a rant incoming.
Their reasoning has less to do with reaction time and more to do with consistency.
i.e no amount of latency will matter as long as your shots register the majority of time... they also don't talk about the interpolation delay caused by the low tickrate... hell, majority of people do not even know what this is or what interpolation does.
20hz is enough to get a good enough packet flow for clients to interpolate and for the server to do proper rollback (upping to 60hz and causing bufferbloat f***s with hit registration as you get delayed packets, or outright dropped packets).
But we get a ton of "issues" with delayed response times because we need at least 2-3 snapshots/packets to properly interpolate (meaning minimum 150ms inherit delay on top of your actual ping).
There are some other things that needs to be mentioned with 60hz servers, which have less to do with servers being able to handle them and more to do with consumer grade cable/adsl/fiber.
I literally have a 1gbit connection with a custom router (10gbit nic etc), and 60hz with 2.5kb or more per packet has a tendency to cause buffer bloat as is even with this in mind.. it needs an aggressive packet scheduler QoS protocol to even combat this, which 99.9% of people do not have.... meaning majority of people would be getting more issues than right now.
Should be mentioned that the majority of ISP's have issues on their end as well.
majority of problems start here.. we could run at 1000hz over lan without issues.. not so much online as they have priority to the bare minimum and tend to focus on tcp/ip (which is not ideal for games whatsoever).
For apex to move over to 60hz they would need an entire overhaul of their netcode/protocol to use dynamic tick rates per player, as well as how they handle interpolation client side to accommodate said dynamic tickrate.... doing server side rollback on this is a nightmare and a half as well... and trust me on this, you do not want client side hit registration.
This is not a small task, and might not even be considered cost effective as delay from netcode etc is a very small complaint considering the entire player base (we are a small subset after all).
To even have a large amount of packets being sent every second they would need to be insanely small.. which they already are considering how much they are sending every single update (50/20, roughly 2.5kb per update for 60players + projectiles + loot etc).
Fortnite etc do not send updates for every single player every packet for instance on, all building etc are fragmented into different packets (i.e not being sent as an entire snapshot)... apex sends everything each and every update, for them to use dynamic tick you would still end up with sub 60hz updates for players (including yourself) and you would still get hit behind cover.
Older games like cs/quake etc could get away with 100-1000hz tickrates as they were sending packets that were 0.5-2kb in size.. even then buffer bloat was an issue, and they were sending faaaar less than apex or any other BR needs to.
On top of all of this we need to consider packet fragmentation, which in of itself can cause a bunch of issues and has a far higher tendency to happen when your sending more of them (and far more considering the quality of connection of most people)..
My point is that just saying "zomfg get better servers respawn" just isn't a reality that can be achieved with any large amount of success.. games like pubg, fortnite etc all have overhauled their netcode and rely a ton on client side hit registration and client side trickery (entity prediction/extrapolation etc.. not optimal for a game like apex tbh).
Both STILL suffer from bufferbloat issues despite all their optimization, they just "hide" it better.
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