I don’t think you are wrong, but here is a bit of my perspective.
Rot has been occurring in the industry for over 10 years now. There are now fewer qualified network engineers than around the turn of the century and companies are less willing to spend money on upgrades of network infrastructure (6500 is still relevant…). Also, many ISPs, at least in the US, have merged resulting in fewer diverse networks.
The upside now at least, is that ports are easily 100g, so you could argue that we need less network equipment and fewer engineers, but I’m not sure how much that offsets the problems. And 100+g ports don’t help you properly run a network, except maybe make it a smaller problem if you need fewer ports.
I don’t think you are wrong, but here is a bit of my perspective.
Rot has been occurring in the industry for over 10 years now. There are now fewer qualified network engineers than around the turn of the century and companies are less willing to spend money on upgrades of network infrastructure (6500 is still relevant…). Also, many ISPs, at least in the US, have merged resulting in fewer diverse networks.
The upside now at least, is that ports are easily 100g, so you could argue that we need less network equipment and fewer engineers, but I’m not sure how much that offsets the problems. And 100+g ports don’t help you properly run a network, except maybe make it a smaller problem if you need fewer ports.