Earlier quoted context omitted.
Once you have authenticated each other and agree to a nice symmetric cipher and exchange the keys for that, yes. Bytes, even kilobytes per second. But note the "once you have authenticated". Public key crypto is brutal number crunching and takes minutes to hours on systems of the 80s, and some noticeable seconds even in the late 90s. I think that's why something like RSA-4096 was not just universally adopted 30 years…
even the crappiest laptop CPU can do 10000 x 4096-bit RSA signature verifications per second my 2014 laptop (on battery, no hardware acceleration): sign verify sign/s verify/s rsa 4096 bits 0.006200s 0.000096s 161.3 10468.9 (not to mention everyone's using ec these days, which is quite a bit faster)
How is it at all comparable to a relatively state of the art 2014 laptop?