Nah, ESP32's have had ethernet capability for a while and ESP-IDF supports it well. I've been using one I built for 5+ years now. Unfortunately RMII (ethernet phy) interface takes up a lot of the GPIO pins. This part looks like it'll remedy that issue.
There's two ESP32 boards that have been around for a while with PoE:
> I'm more hopeful for single-pair ethernet to gain momentum though!
I keep looking for a reasonably priced 10baseT to 10Base-T1L bridge... everything commercial seems too expensive (for me) and the two hobby designs [1] [2] I've seen are not orderable :(
But I'm seeing more commercial options lately, so that's hopeful.
Multidrop SPE isn't going to outperform newer CAN versions though. Somewhere in the sub-100Mb/s (e.g. 10-20Mb/s range) is the practical maximum speed of a multidrop bus at useful lengths, and that essentially applies equally to CAN or SPE. The only way to really get faster in a "multidrop-like" sense is with logically loop-like systems like ethercat and Fibre Channel where each network segment is point-to-point and the nodes are responsible for the routing.
https://www.crowdsupply.com/silicognition/mant1s