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The first and last bullets are extremely optimistic. How do you possibly simulate all the weird interdependent behavior in real world networks?

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Given that a Cisco switch can be replaced with some other company's switch(at least in theory, idk), without weird unknown cases interfering, why would this be a problem ?

Not that straightforward. Similar to CPUs and other HW, there are errata and interop quirks between devices.

There are also tight time budgets (basically SLAs) that must be met along with memory considerations (both in SW and on the NPU/HBM), not to mention how the device needs to respond to load and various failure scenarios.

Is this really the case?

there is software to simulate any arbitrarily complex network: GNS3, eve-ng, Cisco Modeling labs, etc

I'm talking about heterogenous legacy hardware that isn't owned by Cisco, not complex topologies.

Cisco doesn't talk to devices, Cisco talks protocols, most of them are documented in specs and they are often vendor neutral.

if any hardware does not confirm to specs, thats on them and its actually a reason to pull out and replace legacy hw

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