I'm not saying "they literally need to know the FCC regs" - but totally uninformed on how to not step on yourself in a half duplex wifi medium in the same channel with all your equipment, yeah.

Please explain to me the time a hypothetical person that decides to install a bunch of IoT things is referring to a document that explains how to do this? To me this sounds like a classic case of "because of a twist of fate and my hobbies/job/past I happened to do a deep dive on wifi fundamentals at so e point and since I now find it easy and obvious I can't fathom why people with different hobbies/jobs/pasts don't know the same things I find obvious!"

Somebody who has literally 140 discrete wifi based IOT devices yet has put them all on the same channel and is further using half duplex mesh repeaters also on the same single channel, is probably the sort of technology early adopter/enthusiast who thinks they know what they are doing, with a high degree of confidence, but actually doesn't.

I have to admit I am biased by doing some microwave band rf engineering stuff professionally, so my perspective on it is perhaps a bit more critical than others. You could say I've seen how the sausage is made...

Maybe. Or maybe it's someone that paid for a complete remodel and some contractor sold them on making every light and outlet and appliance "smart" along with some more we can't even think of, because that's all extra money to them, and then they throw whatever else they can find at it to make it work because really, they haven't ever put so many things on one network before.

I've heard crazy stories about home installers and contractors that didn't really know what they were doing. Everyone starts somewhere, and it's not always with our own home nor with a mentor that actually knows what they are doing.

Or, it's just some person that did it for their own home but went way too far and when they finally got it working (sort of) decided they really didn't want to touch it again for a while, because it was a pain.

Truthfully, either of those sound kinda likely to me.

I don't think the IoT devices will care that their download speed is somewhat reduced and that they'd have to wait a few ms to get access. These devices will hardly transmit or received any data. Likely a lot of switches, wall outlets and some sensors that you'd want a reading from every minute.

The number of clients should not be an issue, the half-duplex shouldn't be as well...

I'm definitely at least that uninformed. I'd like to think I'd listen to a logically reasoned technical explanation. I really don't understand how wifi works and I know this. Sometimes I wish I did, but not quite enough to do anything about it.