And fucked it up by releasing the 8169 with a stepping change that added power management.
The kernel driver didn't know this, so links would silently not come up, and you wouldn't know why till you googled and learned you had to rebuild your kernel for your new motherboard.
Realtek Freebsd drivers are 'ok' now, but that was a long fight.
Outside of wifi (I mean Jesus christ) most of freebsd networking got fixed a decade ago, but you still need to stick with common-ish gear.
Freebsd on kvm though, that's a game breaker, especially with sriov mellanox.