When you say clouds are these like little mini servers? Just super localised so they don’t have to go as far and can respond quicker?

Exactly

Was 4g on the same plane as usual talk/text? Does it have to go all the way to a bigger cloud through the tower instead of just to the tower?

Yep, well data that needs to go to the cloud does. Facial recognition happens quickly and in small devices, but the computing power comes from a cloud or edge computing back end, and the edge is much faster. Voice traffic doesn't go to the cloud AFAIK.

There are also differences in the frequency, I know much less about this, but different frequency ranges have different properties as far as ability to penetrate walls, etc. The 5G signal doesn't travel as far or as effectively through walls so there must be more cell towers to cover a given area. This may be where the conspiracy people are getting it from, only I think they have it backwards, pretty sure 4G would penetrate your skull better than 5G (actually not sure what they believe).