First Byte Time vs CDN?

Since Discourse blocks the rendering waiting for JS & CSS, you will still make the page interactive faster by leveraging a CDN.

Doing this type of analysis requires a bit more than blindly running lighthouse and webpagetest and picking a result and obsessing over it.

If your priority is having a page with a higher score on those tools I recommend running a blog powered by tools like https://jekyllrb.com/