Surely the solution with someone with that much kit is to turn the TX power wayyy down. I guess it depends how close your neighbours are too, and what kind of building they have.
Hopefully someone with that much kit would be the kind enthusiast who'd be running firmware that allows you to turn TX power below 100%, but it could just as likely be someone who really likes being able to set their light bulb color from their iPhone.
Now I just wish my neighbors would do the same, but I am not going to be the one to suggest it. If I fix up their networking, I will forever be on the hook if anything goes wrong or they face intermittent outages. Been there, done that, didn't even get a t-shirt. Unpaid network janitor is not something I need to add to my resume.
Perhaps one could make work as a network tech for home users, but I feel like people either don't want to pay for it, or don't care because it's "good enough".
Exactly! That's what it was supposed to be. A wifi-neighborly approach - have your local coverage at minimum needed power and with lower pollution. Except that all wifi-devices would be factory configured at increasingly higher 'medium' power setting.
I had fun with just the worst case scenario - 20m away is a glass condo tower right in front of my windows (the list of loud networks is endless), 100m away is a cell-tower. The RF interference from the cell tower so bad across all bands that I could hear it even in radio speakers. Yet, I still get steady browsing speads over my wifi (loud it is), just not practical NAS speeds, so wire does it.
By contrast, for 5 GHz, turn it to minimum and use one AP per room with wired (Ethernet or MOCA not Powerline) backhaul, and ideally APs with smart DFS.