It ought to be, nodes are nodes, but we're talking about the difference between telco legacy interconnect and the dawn of Internet "hotels" which were aggregations near NAP points and convenient telco interconnects. This is what was the problem: ATM, SONET, and other L1/L2 problems. This allowed the concept that some junction points were more important than others, and that an edge device could be poorly provisioned, while big junction points could have nearby CDNs, huge hosts, and so forth.
Add in isometric/QOS protocols, and the lines start to blur further, as we allow multimedia to get priority over non isochronous protocols. We've created protocol priority in the name of not screwing up audio and video feeds. Today, AV feeds permeate and mostly dominate the wires statistically by content type.
Where is the line drawn between QoS protocols, time-sensitive multimedia delivery, brute force bandwidth, and everyone owning the equiv of a Cisco core router?
It's called fiber. FTTH, FTTbedroom, and we need to promulgate fiber transports-- symmetrical ones-- as home edge standards, just like a NEMA 120vac/60hz outlet (or the 220v/ 50-60hz int'l equiv). This at least lifts all boats.