Severe Issues with Messaging Widget

Hopeful anyone here may have some valuable input. We have been struggling with Zendesk Widgets since basically day one. About a year ago, we went live with out Zendesk Help Center - of course super excited to offer support via the widget then too. Due to several limitations of the messaging widget then, we went for the widget classic to start with. Right away experienced severe issues with speed performance/load times on all our sites, where we added the widget. Found a workaround in code for that, and ended up being okay with the performance.

Now for a few months we have been preparing the switch to messaging. Keen to start taking advantage of the bot/automation potential we see in the messaging widget. Unfortunately, when we switched from widget classic to messaging, again we noticed catastrophical effects on performance of our sites. We tried the same workaround that we had with the classic widget, switched again, and the results were even worse. We just can not risk this type of user experience on our sites, the negative effect of the messaging widget on performance there, so always have to switch back to widget classic. Zendesk Support itself unfortunately has been far away from helpful on this matter (currently in our second round of trying to get support directly through Zendesk Messaging in Admin Help Center).

Does anyone anywhere actually use the messaging widget, without third party providers involved, and is happy with the performance? If so I would be super curious to go check that out on a live website, if you want to send me a direct message with a link to that site.

Even our Dev Team is running out of ideas on what we can do here. We fear that using the ZD native messaging widget, without any type of third party help, simply just doesn't work, unless a company is okay with sacrificing website performance.

We are convinced a bug could be causing this honestly, but no one in the ZD Support Team seems to be willing to take a look at that - or can prove us wrong and show us one single live example of a messaging widget on a real life website, that works properly (one that is just there with ZD native features and not combined with a third-party bot)

Really look forward to Feedback here. 

PS: This is a feature included in the pricey plan we are on (48 seats on Enterprise!) - I do not think we should have to pay a third party provider to get this to work for us. Our Dev Team has strictly followed every step of the ZD documentation, please understand that still not being able to switch to messaging is becoming increasingly and heavily frustrating for us.