Yes, I wish it was still like that, with those de facto standards (NE2000, SB / SB Pro2, and we could add VGA/Vesa) that HW manufacturers cared to clone or late

Yes, I wish it was still like that, with those de facto standards (NE2000, SB / SB Pro2, and we could add VGA/Vesa) that HW manufacturers cared to clone or later emulate. That's what I call the golden age of the DOS days (late DOS / early Windows era). Nowadays good luck trying to run a DOS program on a current computer, as chips do not emulate each other any more and you have to have the right driver for the right chip (as if as an end-user we cared which exact property and advanced feature each NIC has, we'd just be happy if there was a standard 100 or even emulated & degraded 10 Mbps mode in such situations). Same PITA for all alternative/niche OS, which can only support a couple of NICs and sound chips (the NICs' situation is often worse because often no documentation is freely available); the only remaining thing is on graphic cards, which support a few Vesa modes (but the standard never got updated to better resolutions, and by better resolutions I don't mean 4K but much less). As almost everyone in the comments, I had many NE2000 clone cards (they were really inexpensive, I had more cards than computers), and I never had a problem with them, and I never heard that they had a bad rep (not even with Linux).