Indeed. A friend who is more plugged into such things me told me 4-5 years ago they laid off most of the senior Intel network driver team. Basically the only edge they had. I can’t imagine things are any better these days.
Inertia is a hell of a thing, but you are starting to see the cracks form. I just don’t know if there is an alternative.
When? The Intel X710 series of network cards was released in 2014, and it wasn't until ~2018 that it became actually usable (end of 2018? I don't recall really, but when I stumbled upon it it had already been a public problem for more than a year, and it took a few more months for patches to come).
I'm talking things like full OS crashes while doing absolutely nothing, no traffic whatsoever or even better, silently starting to drop all network traffic (relatively silently, just an error message in the logs, but otherwise no indication, the interface still shows up as fine and up in the OS). It was all a driver issue (although both Intel drivers didn't work, so not only) that was later fixed.
After that, it was rock solid. But the fact that there was a high class network card sold for lots of money, on hardware compatibility lists at various vendors, which didn't work at all for pretty much everyone for more than a few years is disgusting.
Back at the start of the century, Intel networking cards were the 'Best reliability for the dollar' and for some reason had a grudge against Linksys even before the Cisco buyout [0]. Same for most of their B/G Wireless stuff.
Inertia is a hell of a thing, but you are starting to see the cracks form. I just don’t know if there is an alternative.