there are a lot of things that are at play here, networking has been a commoditised and defragmented place even now, there is a tug of war that is always happen

there are a lot of things that are at play here, networking has been a commoditised and defragmented place even now, there is a tug of war that is always happening between companies who want to commoditise like cisco and junipers who emphasise a lot on the hardware and less on software, there is no proper gui for cisco or juniper products till now. and there is linux networking with tun and tap. one good book is to look at automation of networking (Network Programmability and Automation: Skills for the Next-Generation Network Engineer) which does a good job on the history and is a latest book which goes over a wide variety of places where networking can change. if you delve into kubernetes and virtual networking it is a beast on its own !! so for modern networking just do a lab and do a packet capture and you are good to go ! learning basics gets you no where ! it is like reading how alphabets are formed but never gets you write a poem, use chatgpt when you have a doubt and move on to next topic. topics you need to look at are ipaddressing, bgp, vxlan, iptables thats it !