I am making these Type-C hubs for a living, and indeed RTL8153 is the most trouble free, and cheap chip on the market.
Though, I myself had misfortune buying broken RTL8153 based ethernet NICs. Mismatched coupling capacitors, PCB shorts, possibly broken firmwares.
40%-30% people who do EE in China are just above the Arduino level.
Chinese engineering companies can make good hardware if you pay them, and give time to fix self induced issues coming from rushed development schedules, but in that case, they are not really that ahead from any other EE companies around the world.
Though, I myself had misfortune buying broken RTL8153 based ethernet NICs.
One of the issues with the RTL8153 NIC is (as a sibling commenter points out) that on M1 Macs, you are confined to the CDC-ECM driver. RTL8153 with this driver usually cap at ~700MBit and cause a lot of CPU load (usually restricted to the efficiency cores, but it's still pretty bad anyway).
For USB docks, I can still understand the choice. But IMO this is inexcusable for Thunderbolt docks. You can tunnel PCI-E, so nothing holds dock makers from hanging a good NIC with well-supported drivers on the PCI-E bus. Some higher-end Thunderbolt Docks do this AFAIK. The Apple Thunderbolt 2 Ethernet adapter uses a Broadcom NIC on the PCI-E bus and can reach 1000MBit without causing high CPU loads. Unfortunately, it requires a Thunderbolt 3 -> 2 adapter, which is more expensive than the Ethernet adapter itself.
Though, I myself had misfortune buying broken RTL8153 based ethernet NICs. Mismatched coupling capacitors, PCB shorts, possibly broken firmwares.
40%-30% people who do EE in China are just above the Arduino level.
Chinese engineering companies can make good hardware if you pay them, and give time to fix self induced issues coming from rushed development schedules, but in that case, they are not really that ahead from any other EE companies around the world.