Probably the wrong way to look at it. Digital electronics doesn't really exist outside of theoretical spaces. It's all analogue underneath and any experienced digital designer will know that and what the consequences for things like signal integrity, noise immunity and latency.
They aren’t terrible as long as you have a supply of wall warts available. I ended up powering mine off a little Meanwell switching supply in the end as they don’t blow up as often.
Netgear do some half decent fully managed switches. It’s not all blue crap off Amazon.
The worst switches I ever used were HPE ones in the old C5000 blade chassis. Absolute turds. Packet loss, constant port failures and complete hangs. HPE’s solution was to tell us to buy new ones.
This sounds less stressful than an average half a decade working at my current position. It is actually motivating. Whether or not that was the desired outcome, I don't know. At least I get to travel to half decent academic conferences and not large vendor marketing conferences.