1. There's only one relevant type of optics (Q)SFP(+)(28) instead of many incompatible ones. Line cards have become uncommon.
2. Everything runs Linux so he can just run tcpdump instead of some vendor specific monitor command.
3. 10G ethernet and 56G infiniband are dirt cheap so now there’s a large online community for homelabs that use data center hardware. Nobody needs to be a network guy to run a data center.
the complexity from networking at a DC mainly comes from scale.
running enterprsie/dc hardware in a homelab is vastly different from running it in production.
This applies to all of software. Enterprise and "home" diverged quite a lot. Back in the 2000s running a webserver at home was roughly similar to doing it for a company. Nowadays they are nothing alike with all the load balancing, caching etc. etc.
i.e. enthusiast homelabs from today have sufficient capacity/performance to accomodate production scenarios ("at scale") from 20y ago.
besides the need for appreciation of ones work, everybody, all the time, is cooking with water.
Also, depending on the services which run on the network, more complex technology like MPLS/VXLAN-EVPN is needed.
Also /r/homelab
Search eBay for “10g card” and google the cheapest model number to find the rest :)