> Practically spoken, a lot of the transfer speed advertised by wifi is marketing hogwash barely backed by reality, especially in congested environments.

Yes but a hogwash of several gigabits sometimes does give you real-world performance of more than a gigabit.

> Intel doesn't provide many lanes, so manufacturers don't want to waste valuable lanes permanently for capabilities most people don't ever need.

It's been a bunch of years that a single lane could do 10Gbps, and a bunch more years that a single lane could do 5Gbps.

Also don't ethernet ports tend to be fed by the chipset? So they don't really take lanes.