At the same time, we had cheap consumer gigabit ethernet, and still have cheap consumer gigabit ethernet. 2.5 is getting there price-wise, but switches are still somewhat rare/expensive.
To be fair, I only started this because the dock I got had 10G - https://www.owc.com/solutions/thunderbolt-pro-dock and I saw some 10G cards on eBay cheap and my old Nortel switch had a 10G uplink and ... well, you know how it goes!