There were some “interesting” issues with a lot of the cheap hardware for a long time though. A classic example was the WinModem. A fast modem for cheap? Sure! But it was cheap because it outsourced a lot of its processing to the CPU, so if your system was loaded up (in the day when CPUs were almost all single-core) meant there wasn’t enough left over to process inbound data in realtime which meant dropped packets and retries and horrendous lag and throughput.

Standard wisdom was to use an Intel EtherExpress Pro card for a long time after onboard Ethernet was available. Lots of server hardware had unused builtin NICs until they got decent.