And yes, I've done this stuff at very large scales.
I think people that feel this device is pointless just have not been in a situation where this device is exactly what they needed. It is a niche device, admittedly.
However, you have my attention - what device are you referring to that does this better and cheaper?
Seriously, there isn't a good problem here that this solution solves that isn't better done elsewhere.
Done in actual host CPU consumes resources.
Direct programming on a chipset is a lot more complicated than running an off the shelf router.
Yes this is a niche product - but your proposed alternatives are silly in most cases where just slapping a zero U device into an unused PCIe port is far less complicated, less expensive, and easier to maintain.
This thing costs less than $200, a one time cost. Just reading the Broadcom documentation alone will cost your organization more than that...
The card actually has 4 "ports". 1 virtual port dedicated to management (via PCIe passthrough), 1 GBe port, and 2 SFP28 cages. Plenty for a cloud hosting provider. Both SFP28 cages, plus the virtual 1GBe port support passthrough via PCIe to the physical server.
That's just one use case. Another is a dedicated firewall for the actual physical server that's powering the thing, running at a full 25Gbps consuming zero CPU time on the server itself and zero U's of space... all for less than $199 street price. The card supports PCIe 8x passthrough, so the physical connection to the server is 64Gbps - way more than a single SFP28 cage can support.
Pretty slick...