Not sure why you would say this. My first job was running phone lines through the lowered ceiling to hook up localtalk for the Macs. It worked wonderfully. Even back then Apple was very auto-configure-y which made finding printers and file servers very easy. Just go into Chooser and there they all were.
IP over localtalk was not difficult either. After a couple years it moved to ethernet (coax, yay!) and that worked fine too. Networking Macs has always been extremely easy.
I agree. The Mac was great at networking in 1993. Sure, MacTCP and MacPPP may have had strange configuration UI but localtalk and ethertalk Just Worked, and getting MacTCP and MacPPP working wasn't too hard.
My memories of AppleTalk wasn't so fond - though I can't for the life of me remember why as it seems so long ago now and I've filled my brain full of a few decades more technojunk since. But I do remember being joyful when it came time to port the various Mac LANs over to TCP/IP.
