The turbulent times and the breakneck speed of computer development need to be taken into account. Not long before that computer networks were strictly corporate things installed by contractors choosing hardware, driver and software suppliers suitable for tasks performed by employees or students, and someone who installed it at home was the same kind of nerd who would drag an engine from the work into his room to tinker. Non-business-oriented software rarely cared about third party network functions. Then network card became a consumer device, and a bit later it became integrated and expected.

Also, Windows did not install TCP/IP components on computers without a network card (most of them until the Millennium era), it was an optional component. You could not “ping” anything, as there was no ping utility, nor libraries it could call. In that aspect, those network-less Windows systems were not much different from network-less DOS systems. The installer probably still works that way (or can be made to, by excluding some dependencies), but it's hard to find hardware without any network connectivity today. I wonder what Windows 11 installer does when there is no network card to phone home...

> I wonder what Windows 11 installer does when there is no network card to phone home...

One of "works fine", "needs a command line trick to continue" or "refuses to work completely" depending on which specific edition of win11 your computer has been afflicted with.