Does MikroTik live in the same prosumer space that made ubiquiti products so popular early on?
I.e. among people where I know what kind of stuff they have, anybody vaguely technical might have an Ubiquiti AP for their WiFi, whereas the people that love to tinker with networking stuff have some mikrotik device somewhere to play with.
I don't deal much with IXPs, but I did hear somewhere that there were a shockingly high number of mikrotik peers at one exchange point (10%+)
You could potentially build a Linux PC to do some of the more basic stuff that most ISPs require at a similar price, such as PPPoE concentrators, but it's still a lot more hands-on work for no clear benefit.
I can't find right now what the market share of peering routers is in Rio's IX, but i feel like it's significantly higher than 10% (probably between 20 to 30%).
Unifi really does unify the entire ecosystem, it's basically the Apple of network gear down the quality of packging. I love it.
I heard good things about Mikrotik but their product line feels scattered and unorganized.