In my opinion, the real issue is that people have gotten into the habit of using "intel NIC" as shorthand for "not absolute bottom barrel components". The issues with RTL gear in recent years isn't the chipset, it's a crappy voltage controller or dodgy capacitor or PoS PHY or somesuch, because that's what you get when you buy a board that retails for $50. You couldn't get an intel NIC on a board that cheap, so by default you tended to get higher quality components. Now that the intel NIC is integrated, you're starting to see them on $50 boards with crappy components, and yes, it's becoming more common to find intel NICs with the same sorts of wacky problems that you used to see with RTL NICs (not even talking about the counterfeits!) In both cases it's still not the network controller that's bad, it's something else in the physical stack. In either case you roll the dice and figure if you get a bad $50 board you might still come out ahead buying another one instead of one $200 board. Unless you're running freebsd, then you've got to buy intel because it's the only driver likely to work.
I agree with everything you wrote, but the last sentence about FreeBSD really amused me.
As a happy user of FreeBSD during more than 20 years, I know very well that even if what you wrote is not true, it also is quite close of being true.
This is not something specific to NICs, for any kind of hardware, if there is something made by Intel, then it is much better supported by FreeBSD than anything from other vendors.
A few years ago I decided to no longer connect the modem of my ISP to an internal Ethernet interface of my router, but to a USB 3.0 GbE interface.
(There were 2 reasons, one was to allow me to substitute the router whenever I want without wasting time in discussions with the ISP to update their allowed-to-connect MAC address, the other reason was that I prefer an USB Ethernet interface for facing the hostile Internet, instead of an internal Intel interface, about which I cannot be really sure that any method of remote administration is completely disabled).
The USB Ethernet happened to use the ASIX chipset and, because I use FreeBSD on the router, there were several moments of suspense when I connected it, while I wondered whether it will work well or not.
Fortunately the GENERIC FreeBSD kernel works OK with ASIX, but one is not always so lucky, so it is indeed better to avoid risks by using Intel NICs.