I'm using the sonnet at work. Work paid for it. Yes it's more expensive. I have gotten over 25 gbps bidirectional, but not by much. Maybe 27. A big downside is that it only supports 15W upstream power which I didn't think to check, so since that laptop only has 2 usb-c ports for power input, it's a bit limiting.

The upside, though, was that I plugged it in, got my throughput, and never had to worry ever again. Remember that engineering time is mucho $$. So troubleshooting overheating, divising a solution, manufacturing it, etc, that all eats into the savings.

The $400 dock would be cool though. It seems smaller than the sonnet and fixes my charging problem. Weirdly I didn't think I'd care about not including transceivers but they did actually come in handy, so that is a downside. Might try to get one of these if I need another one in the future.