Do high-efficiency furnaces work well in older homes with restrictive ducting?
If by airflow you mean the flow of heated air through your home, then I would say yes: a furnace needs to be sized based on how much heated air can be pumped through your home. If your furnace is enormous, and your ducts are small enough that the total air flow is too low, then the furnace won't be able to transfer enough heat to the home air, producing too-hot output air while reducing the furnace's efficiency.

However, this does NOT mean that no high-efficiency furnace will work with an older home with few/narrow heating ducts. You just have to find one that's appropriately sized.

A side note: furnace installers have a tendency to over-size furnaces and boilers, on the theory that too big is better than too small. The truth is that many (most?) furnaces and boilers are larger than they need to be. So, get a heat loss calculation done for your home and then proceed from there.