One thing that isn't mentioned is that the physical layer at the time was 'flat' ie: a network had a shared wire. That means bus arbitration (to prevent collisions) was a big deal. Token ring solved that by passing tokens, which presumably guarantees latency. I believe Ethernet just raised a line high, and it was up to everyone to respect that.

Of course that changed when switches came out. I have a 10/100 hub in a closet somewhere for debugging, since it's nice to not have to remember how to get into a switch and set the monitor port.

Token ring equivalents are still used in lots of places. From what I remember cable modem data is basically token ring off of channel 0 (though that may not be accurate anymore).