i have a customer telling me - https://docs.citrix.com/en-us/citrix-workspace/optimize-cvad/workspace-network-location improved their MS teams performance. Isn't teams communication going directory to the internet? does that make sense?

Direct workload connection prevents hairpinning of HDX traffic (going out to inet and back in) for internal clients if using CWS/Gateway service. MS teams will connect to the various public IP's as per below. This requires a internet connection to O365 urls/IP's from the datacenter the VDA's reside https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/enterprise/urls-and-ip-address-ranges?view=o365-worldwide