Very slow google drive mount in linux; impossible to stream music or video

What's the actual file you were playing? It has a lot of open and close files in there, which is slow on cloud storage.

egrep 'O_RDONLY|Flush: err=' rclone.log |wc -l
52

If you plan to play music, seems like most players open and close a lot. You may want to use the cache backend.