"A bunch of high spec 386s with specific network cards" was pretty unaffordable for (especially young, and most were at the time) hobbyists in '92. We know how it went with that and Linux (which ran on most cheap 386s).
I ran Linux on a 486SX with 4MB RAM in early 1994. Prior to that (1993?) I had been running 386BSD. Both OSes ran quite well on that hardware: certainly sh, vi, gcc, and make ran well, and what else do you really need?
4MB wasn't good enough for X Windows, but I had a VT102 connected to a serial port so that I could have two terminal sessions going at the same time.
I was a student and ate only very cheap food the rest of that month.
Oh, and a bit later (two or three years) Tanenbaum visited my University and held a lecture about Amoeba.
Better -- meaning polished, thoroughly engineered, correct, etc. -- is often heavier in terms of hardware requirements. It's also often a lot of work by serious career devs or big companies and costs money and has a non-OSS license.
All that increases not only cost but more importantly friction. So the "worse" cheap/free unencumbered thing goes viral and takes over instead.
I should add the caveat though -- it's cheap/free up front but you pay later in bugs and ugly hacks to make it work at larger scale. But up front friction matters more than friction later. If it's cheap/free in terms of cost or friction now, you'll already have sunk cost by the time the real cost becomes apparent.
Another example is how C++ and Java, but not Smalltalk, became the dominant object-oriented programming languages in the 1990s, despite Smalltalk being older and (debatably) being closer to Richard Gabriel's "right thing". There were affordable C++ implementations from Borland and Microsoft, and Sun released the Java Development Kit for free. However, the leading Smalltalk implementations of the 1990s were much more expensive. Perhaps had there been a Borland Turbo Smalltalk or a Microsoft Visual Smalltalk in the 1990s, maybe things would have turned out differently.
https://books.google.com/books?id=CD8EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA25&dq=d...
September 1991 — "Smalltalk/V code is portable between the Windows and the OS/2 versions. And the resulting application carries no runtime charges. All for just $499.95."
(Advert on the last page of "The Smalltalk Report")
https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkRepor...
September 1991 — "Digitalk, Inc. announced new versions of Smalltalk/V DOS and Smalltalk/V Mac that include royalty-free runtime. Smalltalk/V Windows and Smalltalk/V PM are already royalty free. … Prior to this new policy, there was a per-copy charge for runtime applications."
"The Smalltalk Report" p25
https://rmod-files.lille.inria.fr/Archives/TheSmalltalkRepor...
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Lest we forget applets https://dev.java/duke/
Messing around with lisp and smalltalk environments is fun. But the moment you have to stick your hand beneath the surface, you can very quickly end up in someone else's overengineering hell. Most serious GNU Emacs users shudder at the thought of hitting Doom Emacs with a wrench until it suits their tastes. It's universally agreed that building your Emacs environment up from the defaults is fundamentally a wiser choice. Now realize that a full Lisp operating system is several orders of magnitude more complex than Doom Emacs, and most things you're going to program emacs to do are absolutely trivial in comparison to most industrial-grade application logic.
Or about 2 months revenue of newspaper route.
Linux 0.98 shortly afterward and Donald Becker's Ethernet driver.