[Ives]

Agreed, but most I2C busses only have 2 or 3 devices on them. There are some boards with 16 or so devices on the same bus, but much more than that and you'd better hope you can either program their addresses or order them with a specific address, or you might end up with 2 chips with the same address.

[fra]

I've worked on server hardware with dozens of devices on a bus :-). Making sure addresses were programmable was a must indeed.

[oliverx0]

This happened to me once. Used proximity infrared sensors that used I2C with a fixed address. Needed to use multiple of them. I was able to fix it with a tri-state buffer, but quite the pain to figure out why things were not working and coming up with a solution.