It's sad to hear how Cisco has fallen. I remember working on some early ISP networks in the 90's. Cisco was everywhere!
Back then they only really did routing and switching, and those are still the only things that Cisco kind-of does well.
Almost every new product of theirs I’ve touched in the last 20 years has been trash, and even the R&S golden goose is being dragged in that direction with customer-hostile functionality like Smart Licensing and a general decline in quality.
Just because something is/was widely deployed does not mean it was good
So was Oracle and Microsoft Windows.
If history has taught us anything. It’s that the measure of a successful product is usually more to do with its sales people.