Please stop with the hyperbole. Wi-Fi 7 is fantastic and has a ton of great features over Wi-Fi 6(E). I apprechiate that RTing did the article about MLO but I honestly think it has done more damage than good because people now seem to think Wi-Fi 7 is just about MLO.

MLO has multiple parts to it, and EMLSR is a required feature of Wi-Fi 7. All Wi-Fi 7 devices on the market support EMLSR.

What EMLSR does is let your device be connected to multiple channels (like 5GHz and 6GHz) at once. It greatly improves reliability, which I think is something people will enjoy even if it doesn't increase throughput.

What a lot of devices and consumer routers are lacking is the optional STR part of MLO which allows the device to send and transmit data on both channels it's connected to at the same time. I personally don't think increasing throughput is all that important since the bottleneck these days is usually somewhere else, like unreliable connections (because of interference) or a bottleneck in the upstream connection (like the connection to the ISP).

So I think EMLSR is the actually important aspect of MLO, and it is a required feature. Other than MLO, Wi-Fi 7 also introduces preamble puncturing, which is another mandatory feature that is really good. With Wi-Fi before 7, if you got let's say a 80Mhz wide channel and something generates a lot of interference let's say 25MHz into the channel, you will drop down to 20Mhz of usable channel-width. With Wi-Fi 7 and preamble puncturing, the Wi-Fi can isolate the interference and keep perhaps 60MHz usable rather than the 20MHz. That in theory could triple your throughput in that scenario.

Another mandatory feature is Multiple Resource Unit (MRU). With Wi-Fi 6, the biggest improvement was OFDMA. It let's multiple devices transmit or receive data from an access point at the same time by dividing the Wi-Fi channel into several sub-carriers (called resource units). With Wi-Fi 6 and 6E, each client could only use one resource unit at once. With Wi-Fi 7, each device can use multiple which allows for better utilization of the channel (and thus higher throughput when multiple devices are connected). Another fantastic feature in Wi-Fi 7 that will really help in some scenarios.

Wi-Fi 7 also requires stricter security than Wi-Fi 6E. 6E already made WPA3 mandatory for 6GHz, but with Wi-Fi 7 made it mandatory for 2,4GHz and 5GHz as well (and also makes Hash-to-Element mandatory), and they have introduced new ciphers for OWE and SAE (GCMP 256 to be more precise) and we are also getting new, more secure Authentication and Key Management suites (AKM).

Two of the optional features that I am not sure are widespread is also 4K-QAM, a much more granular modulation which allows for higher data rates. Not sure how usable that will be though because you need really high SNR to do that granular of a modulation. It also introduces 320MHz channel width in the 6GHz spectrum. Probably not that usable in most places, but if you live in an area with few neighbors close by then you could in theory make this extremely wide channel and get a ton of throughput.

I think there is absolutely a case to be made that manufacturers should have been more clear about the capabilities of their Wi-Fi 7 equipment, but it really pains me to see so many people now go "Wi-Fi 7 is bad because most devices don't do STR" (or call non-STR devices "not true Wi-Fi 7") when there are a lot of great stuff in Wi-Fi 7 that are now being completely ignored or forgotten about because all the focus is on STR. I think part of the issue is that STR is really easy to market, so a lot of focus has been placed on that. It is easier to explain "it can connect to 5GHz and 6GHz at once" than to explain more granular modulation, or preamble puncturing, or using multiple resource units at once, or compressed block Acks.