Switches also allowed for centralized management.
Note that cable works on what essentially is token ring, at least conceptually; channel 0 (i believe, it's been a while) is the heartbeat.
Over the years the cost of switches lowered to the point where it became cost effective to directly connect hosts and reap the benefits of reducing layer-2 segments to a single host. In between there was also a time where most hosts connected to hubs which then connected to switches.
There were actually these connectors you could get from AMP that would hide away the thinnet connection behind a wall plate, with proprietary connectors to the machine, just to keep people's hands away from the shared network segment.
I remember my first Internet company, where after getting an ARN for free. Coordinated with uunet over IRC to get them to pull routes from me, turning up our second T1.
The second traffic started to flow the collision light on the 24 port 3com fast Ethernet hub went solid.
I thought I had routed the Internet over my link.... but no, two T1s through an Alta Vista firewall running on a DecStation was enough to do it with a basic three their web app while backups were running.
I had lots of experience with 10base2/5 with more traffic, but the stocastic nature of web traffic was problematic.
If you lived through the growth of the Cisco chassis switches, the ASIC improvements that allowed for management was quite obvious.
I remember fighting with packet engine engineers, advocating for jumbo frames as default. They wanted to support gig-e hubs, which would have never been useful due to collisions.
History proved me right there, nothing simpler than a store and forward bridge made it to mass market for Gig-e