Somehow lovely, but also wrong, export includes mac addresses and for example exporting wifi/wireless/wlan configuration sets the same mac address on different devices (in relation to the argument “same device” vs “other devices”).
More literally violating the whole concept definition of “export”, excluding some truly transparent failover configurations which in themselves have much more challenging issues than demanding including mac addresses by default.
Backup files are intended to be restored on very same device. They might be restored on different device of very same model … and if they are used to restore service after hardware breakdown, that works … by keeping MAC addresses even better, other networked devices even won’t notice hardware replacement.
Any other use of backups is clearly out of intended scope … and if it seems that it somehow works but with gotchas … then there you have. It’s up to you to work around those gotchas.
The same goes to text exports … they are hardly applicable to devices of different model. So duplicating config is always a bit tedious work … some experienced ROS admin might script things around the gotchas. It’s pretty easy to, e.g., remove MAC addres settings from textual export …
IMO the beauty of ROS is flexibility … which doesn’t come cheap. So either learn and adapt … or go with different vendor with more “user friendly” UI. By overlaying “beauty” over ROS’ flexibility, we’ll either end up with bloated UI or with less flexibility. I’d hate to see happen either.