Unless you got yourself into a situation where you were expected to set up a whole office with the same speed and expertise as a full-time network engineer based on some gross misrepresentation of your skillset, I don't see how this story is particularly relevant. Maybe it's a good cautionary tale about presuming that SoHo is the limit of networking?

Technical topics are indeed both very deep and very broad. The level of sophistication and depth is how you choose your specialization, but that doesn't mean you're never allowed to learn anything else. You should learn enough about each field to know the shores when you're standing there, to be able to communicate with the "natives"/specialists, and to know when you're getting out of the shallow end. This expectation should exist for everyone: DBA, application developer, devops, network, whatever. They should all know the territory and be able to work together cohesively to identify the best place to take something down deep.

Depending on the constraints of the project, leaving the shallows means either a) developing more proficiency directly and getting deeper yourself; or b) acknowledging that you need someone with more expertise in that area to take it from there while you go back to handle things in areas you know better.

The thing we must avoid is "well I'm not a network engineer so I don't look at Cisco configs, sorry". That should be replaced with "well I'm not a network engineer, so I have no idea what's happening here, but it's still interesting, can I sit behind you and learn?"