> For waze’s case, I supposed their priority is not on salvaging the 1% longest request (though critical to you), and instead preserve server resources for the 99% faster clients.

What resources? Buffering a response takes a minuscule amount, and if even a tiny fraction of people try again it will waste far more.

And even if it did take more in total, it would not be by much. This justification for saying it's not a wrong value is very weak.