Fair enough, the license check is lame at least on the beta (I haven’t tried non-beta with network off today). Though it’s a bit of a stretch to go from that to “therefore this is the precise cause of this precise mysterious slowdown that some but not all people see sometimes”.
I suspect the cause is rather more simple and involves leaking of generated objects that should get dropped out of the simulation over time and don’t. This would make sense, and doesn’t require any magic guesses about how networks could cause problems that don’t sound like network problems.