Their network card still would have broken at some point and they'd be in the same bind they are in now: A non-working critical part and at the mercy of the developers to identify and fix the bug.
Exactly this thing happened to me in an OpenBSD upgrade. My network card no longer worked. That prompted me to actually read the release notes, and I quickly found the reason.
Downvote me all you want. Tough love is what's needed here. Hiding my comments isn't going to make peoples' negligence any less their fault.