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No, it was great, but BNC / Coax ethernet was awful and horrible and an absolute nightmare to debug. I probably still have a drawer full of terminators somewhere

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I remember the many advertisements for LAN analyzers back in computer magazines aiming at the "professionals" IT audience.

Are those still in wide use today, for maybe other reasons?

Yes. Good ones will have a time-domain reflectometer (TDR) that will tell you were the break or sharp bend in the cable is in addition to the standard is this cable terminated correctly test.

They will also be able to do basic connectivity tests to make sure things above the physical layer (eg: is there DHCP?) are operating correctly so you don't also need to swap to a laptop to fully troubleshoot a network drop.

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