There are still far more people below gigabit speeds than there are people hitting their gig. As more fiber is deployed that may change, but it's still a very functional device regardless.
There is one potential hurdle though: they specifically mention that it can handle 1G of traffic even if you enable a bunch of features. They would have had to upgrade the processors to be able to make the same claim at 2.5
If they are making it a point to address that in this current product I feel like they want to make sure that type of call out doesn’t happen again.
I guess they could always do a Tri-Band, WiFI 6E with 2 2.5xGbps Ethernet for $199. ( That would be awesome )
I also wouldn't call it nothing, 2.5g switches have much higher consumption and get hotter, let alone 10g.
Why should a backup from my laptop to my file server be limited to 1gbps? Has nothing to do with outside connection. Tehre are a lot of use cases for faster home networking irrelevant of network speed to the external world
Otherwise the wireless throughput is nowhere near gigabit so you would be limited by that anyway.
Perhaps putting it another way will help -- according to the FCC's most recently release Internet reports[1], only 13% of subscribers have at least 940 mbps down. However, 57% are at least 100 mbps, but less than 940 mbps. There's a juicer market segment for gig and below than there is for above gig. Increasing the prices to attract 13% of the market isn't terribly worth it in this case.