I absolutely understand the importance of network performance in gaming.

My observation was on how vocal gamers tend to be in their excitement about hardware. I see gaming media go nuts over CPU and GPU releases. There's excitement and detailed analysis of motherboards. I've seen in depth content on storage, and there's been a lot of hype over the PS5's new storage architecture. RAM gets attention. Obviously displays get lots of attention, both from a visual quality and refresh frequency perspective. There are endless buying guides for peripherals such as mice, keyboards, and headsets.

I don't tend to see much content on networking, nor anything approaching the excitement I've seen for any of the categories above.

These observations do not diminish the importance of the network in online gaming. I merely noted that networking hardware tends to generate less vocal excitement among gamers. Beyond networking equipment, I believe gamers lead in hardware excitement.

Network performance may be important but the reality is that for the most part those things which influence network performance are out of the hands of gamers. There is "gaming" network hardware out there but for the most part I would categorize it with the $500 coax cables sold to audiophiles.

The biggest lever in the toolbox for a typical user to optimize network is good old ethernet. Wired vs wireless will typically reduce latency a little bit and massively improves on jitter, which is arguably more important for competitive gaming (within a reasonable range of latency).

Outside of that, I agree.