Exactly!
WiFi 4, 802.11n, maxes out at 600Mbsp
WiFi 5, 802.11ac, maxes out at 3.5Gbps
WiFi 6, 802.11ax, and WiFi 6E, both max out at 9.6Gpbs
WiFi 7, 802.11be, maxes out at 46Gpbs.
Most of the people here who complain about the lack of WiFi 7 will be posting through their home Internet connection. The median US household internet speed is less than 250Mbps — far lower than the WiFi 4 theoretical max.
Almost stole the words out of my mouth mate. All I would add to your excellent description is the speeds you have quoted above are the theoretical maximum speeds the standard can achieve. In the case of WIFi 7, the 46Gbps is achieved using all 16 channels simultaneously on the 6ghz band and a 320MHz channel, so lets get everyone to step back into reality and realise this cannot be achieved as there simply is no hardware in existance to support this.
Let's also mention client devices, as these are the true limiting factor of your wireless network speed. Remember a wireless connection is only as fast as its slowest link. So in this case nearly every client in existence today only supports 2x2 MIMO, so for WiFi 6E, it means 2402Mbps and for WiFi 7 it is 5804Mbps, yes that is the theoretical maximum speed possible or it's PHY speed when right next to the router. That's it, it cannot be faster, no matter what your router says it can do, though it is usually slower. All those AX11000 and BE30000 speed claims are just marketing hype and lies, those speeds cannot be achieved ever! To be faster a client (phone, laptop, etc) would need to use a 4x4 MIMO client and no one uses these because 1. they don't exist and 2. power draw, they would simply drain devices too fast. That is why clients are usually the main reason of slow speeds, your routers transmit power is many magnitudes (4-10+) higher than your clients. It is why downloads are faster and uploads are slower over WiFi unless you are very close to the router, the further you are the greater the differential until it drops connection.
Let's look at one of the fastest WiFi 7 routers you can buy right now, the ROG GT-BE98 that offers "ultrafast BE30000 speeds", when in reality it offers throughput on
two 6GHz bands running at up to 11529Mbps each, up to 5764Mbps at 5GHz and 1376Mbps at 2.4GHz. Remember these are max theoretical speeds with devices right next to each other and you can only connect to one of these bands at a time, so pick your max speed. Currently only 2x2 MIMO client devices exist so again on that 6GHz band you are still stuck at 5804Mbps theoretical. One of the 6GHz bands can be used as backhaul between 2 GT-BE98's in a mesh, but what good is that speed (which would only be half or less of that once you factor in walls and distance), when your internet conenction is only 1Gbps. There is zero benefit. The only benefit of the max theoretical WiFi 7 2x2 MIMO client speeds is if you had an internet connection say of 5Gbps or more, or a NAS connected to your router via 10Gbps network ports on each end, capable of read/writes in excess of 600mb/s, or maybe a USB3 SSD plugged into your router. Though if the SSD is your use case, just plug it into your device.
Yes there is MLO, but has this ever actually been proven and tested in real life, not that I am aware of, currently it is only been run in labs and is in the 802.11be standard (which is being ratified by end of 2024). There is firmware updates yet to come to any WiFi 7 devices out now to bring this feature into reality and talk is it may end up being as useful as MU-MIMO, the amazing feature that worked in labs but not in the real world. Simply put, there is so much of WiFi 7 that is yet to be tested or is so far only words on a page, that all these new features have to be taken with a grain of salt until there is actual devices capable of using these features and more important... reliably.
I'm going to be different here and say Apple did the right thing and implemented a solid WiFi option that will suit 99% of users. WiFi 7 is still very new tech with many features still not enabled which have been promised in "future firmware updates", but who knows how many firmware versions we will need to go through to iron out all the bugs and even then the early chips may have hardware limitations or faults that simply cannot be overcome with firmware. The next Mac mini/Macbook pro update will come in roughly 18 months and will have a more mature and solid chip capable of WiFi7. Future proofing with beta tech.... lol. Anyone who truly needs fast relaible network access for a proper use case will get a 10Gbps network update in their mini. For everyone else, WiFi 6E is more than ample. If this offends you, look back at your last 20 years of WiFi use and wonder how horrible it has been to achieve absolutely nothing with those garbage connections.