Yeah. Super Socket 7 was a great platform. Plugging cpu's from different manufacturers into a common socket, a choice of 3rd party chipsets, wide range of cpu speeds / TDP / price, and good longevity.
These days sockets are shortlived & each manufacturer has their own. Or cpu's (and even RAM) soldered directly onto a board so you can't upgrade anything.
Not only CPUs, but also multiple Chipset manufacturers all supporting same Socket 5-7-SS7. Performance delta between worst (some VIA, async cache) and best (TX, Pipelined) chipset/cache configuration was up to straight 50% https://dependency-injection.com/early-pentium-chipsets/ and thats before you picked CPU and graphic card :o Wild times.
I remember consistently having reliability issues with Windows 98 when installed on systems with VIA chipsets, but almost no problems with Intel chipsets. Gigabyte motherboards if it makes a difference, and yes, the chipset drivers were installed.
Yeah, that sucks. Used to be, one could just replace a single component to upgrade one's PC, soon you could no longer just replace the CPU, you needed a new motherboard, which also required new RAM. We lost something there.
These days sockets are shortlived & each manufacturer has their own. Or cpu's (and even RAM) soldered directly onto a board so you can't upgrade anything.