A related factor was responsibility shirking: some companies tried to claim that the problem for their lack of authentication / encryption was a problem with WiFi. I gave a few talks back then pushing what's now termed zero trust and you could just see the instinctive rejection from the telecom guys who were used to thinking of security as a function of the physical environment. That got criticism at the time, of course, but it really became untenable after so many malware attacks finally got the point through that you could not possibly rely on trusting the network layer.