No, my proposal is that the majority of the users should not have to deal with an out-of-tree network driver because of a few corner cases, and that hopefully mhwd might be adapted to distinguish between those corner cases — which all probably come from a licensee of the pertinent Realtek chipset, because the Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 proper works with r8169 — and the more modern ones.
Besides, we’ve just had confirmation here on the forum that r8169 works on a machine from back in 2015. So it really does come down to just a few corner cases, most of which have probably gone off the market by now.
The official driver for that device from the kernel developers is r8169.
Yes, I have. I also monitor the PCLinuxOS forum, which is another rolling-release distribution I’ve used in the past, and there too people are reporting problems with r8168.