It’s interesting to look decades ahead. One day DSL and metallic paths will be long-forgotten, totally obsolete and people will fondly or otherwise remember all the problems, maintenance, the tweaking and the vast body of lore, knowledge, expertise associated with dsl, lines and modems.
Like vinyl records, with noise scratches, warps, off-centring and problems with cartridge alignment and arm geometry, all that knowledge will be irrelevant and possibly lost. I used to know all about different types of arm and cartridge. I set up an arm with alignment geometry kits to try and minimise the max geometric angular alignment error across the record. Put damping fluid in the arm. Had an RIAA eq input on an integrated amp. All that went when CD arrived, and vinyl was forgotten. I unlike others have, no fondness for vinyl. I hated it back in the 70s, it was a nightmare as keeping records clean was horrible plus there was the nightmare of records arriving damaged in the first place. I should perhaps have shelled out a small fortune for a Keith Monks machine’. But the moment I heard about digital audio, I couldn’t wait for the first CD players.