It was only later that Usenet used the internet to pass messages. That
caused fairly instantaneous replies, since the messages propagated
so much faster, and the batching was gone, so messages flowed out
at a near continous basis.
Of course, the tradeoff was that it moved away from being a co-operative
system, I'll hold your and transfer your messages if you do the same for
me, to a more commercial enterprise, where third parties took care of the
news and the ISPs paid them for it. That move away from the origins is
bound to be the cause of some/many ISPs no longer carrying the newsgroups.
Michael