My experience matches yours. Bulk inexpensive hardware that you can buy by the pallet is consistently very reliable over several years in my experience. I've had more reliability issues with gold-plated "enterprise" hardware and cloud services in practice.

Supply chain management and coordination is, IMHO, the most difficult part of it and is often overlooked in these discussions. Herding vendors to deliver hardware on your timeline from overseas supply chains doesn't always turn out the way you want, even with the best planning.