I need a set of flags that captures changes quickly and yields low latency for an rclone mount

[asdffdsa (jojothehumanmonkey)]

welcome to the forum,

--poll-interval is not supported for sftp remotes.

@data-hobbyist

Commands like ls /path/to/file take forever (like 8 seconds) to return results on a directory with less than 10 files

that is because of --dir-cache-time 2s
after two-seconds, the vfs dir cache is considered stale.
so each time you visit that directory, rclone has to re-scan. and sftp is very slow at that.

@data-hobbyist

You will see the --vfs-cache-mode off flag below because caching would just mean I see stale data

that is not correct, it is a bit confusing.
that flag is for the vfs file cache, which has nothing to do with the vfs dir cache.
your issue is with the vfs dir cache.

check out my summary of the two vfs caches