Ask HN: What is so hard about WiFi Mesh?

I've been burned with TP Link's Deco that is advertised as a mesh but sneakily isn't.

Meshforce also sucks more than it works reliably. Needs to reboot every couple of days and drops requests like hot potatoes.

OpenWRT seems like a logical solution, but you apparently need to be an enthusiast to get it to work, reliably, over a prolonged period.

So, question: Why does daisy-chaining requests across adjacent nodes work so well in TCP/IP, but seems to be so hard and fails so miserably when we move it to the physical world? What am I missing?