Sure, but the problem really was the lack of upstream bandwidth meant to handle the acknowledgements at the time. It's not so much "Should I buffer or should I not?" as it was more about "What is the proper amount to upstream bandwidth to allow people to properly let them use their downstream bandwidth?"

One could tell it was the cable modem buffering quite easily by watching ping times to an external ip. When the buffer got full. Pings which should have been dropped came in maybe 4, 5, or 6 seconds later.

Only by eliminating the buffer entirely in the cable company provided cable modem allowed TCP congestion algorithms to work correctly. UDP may suffer, sure, but I didn't really care about UDP packets back then. I cared more about browsing and downloads.