Long time Cisco here. I feel like Cisco destroyed themselves.
Have any of you ever worked with Mikrotik gear? Amazingly inexpensive. Highly easy to use. Command line is pretty much linux. The GUI management tool works on an app or a browser.
If you want to just try it out, you can download the OS, install it in a virtual machine on a laptop, and run it. It actually will work that way.
With the 2nd world, the global South, and rural America coming online, this is the gear being installed. None of those people can afford Cisco gear or their insane licensing. Mikrotik pretty much unlimited license is about $300 and is perpetual.
This is yet one more boat Cisco missed.