WTF did I just read? Did you ever bother to read that blog post from Relic a long time ago when they introduced battle servers? *snip*
I've just gone through the blog and none of the posts seem to say anything about how the servers actually work. Any mention of Steamworks is in relation to when they had to move the earlier games over from the previous Relic servers. I'm guessing you got that mixed up, unless you can provide a source.
At any rate, you can see your ping to the server (whatever type it may be) in CELO, and I've only ever noticed it report a ping equal to from here to USA for me, even when playing against another Australian.
I'm experiencing alot of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WQh4f0bOS4 so maybe it isn't connection? I don't know how to resolve it. Running a 980 GTX with Decent Cable internet actually great internet Overwatch and SC2 have no issues.
Since they got rid of P2P there's no way the other players should theoretically be able to cause lag for you anymore. Only your connection to the Battleserver should matter because the Battleserver runs a control simulation of the game at a (presumably) uninterrupted rate. That's why the game suddenly runs at a very fast speed until it catches up after an interruption.
However, the game's engine is so poorly made that it can be hard to tell what's a connection problem and what's a performance problem. Those pauses are very common.