It is not laziness and it is not cost cutting. 2.4 GHz is a deliberate trade, and understanding which part of the trade you are living with explains most "the camera keeps dropping" complaints.
The trade being made
2.4 GHz reaches further through walls and costs less power to transmit, which matters for a battery device that has to wake, send, and go back to sleep in under a second. The radios are cheaper and the silicon is mature. The price is congestion: fewer non-overlapping channels, more neighbours, and every microwave, cordless phone and Bluetooth device in the building contributing noise.
5 GHz is the opposite. More spectrum, far less interference, much shorter range and worse penetration, and generally higher power draw. For a mains-powered device on a good signal it would be fine. For a battery doorbell at the far end of a hallway it would be a measurable hit to battery life and a real hit to reliability.
Why the mesh makes it worse
Mesh systems try to be helpful and that is where it goes wrong. Band steering pushes clients to 5 GHz, and a device that cannot see 5 GHz is simply not steered, which is fine, but the same feature will sometimes move a 2.4 GHz client between access points aggressively, and each handover is a re-association the device has to pay for with a wake cycle.
Then there is the single-SSID problem. With one network name for both bands, the device picks whatever it can see at power-on. If the node nearest the doorbell is placed where 2.4 GHz is weak but 5 GHz is strong, the device associates with a distant node instead of the nearby one, and no amount of mesh optimisation fixes a client making a bad choice at boot.
DFS channels are the third one. Some 5 GHz channels require radar avoidance, and when an access point detects radar it moves. That only affects 5 GHz, but the resulting reconfiguration can interrupt 2.4 GHz service briefly too, and a device that was already marginal may not come back on its own.
What actually helps
Split the SSIDs, or at least give the smart-home devices their own 2.4 GHz network with a fixed channel. Pick channel 1, 6 or 11 by looking at what the neighbours use rather than leaving it on auto. Place one node so that the weakest device, usually the doorbell or the furthest camera, has clear line of sight rather than optimising for the middle of the house.
Check the signal at the device, not at the phone. Anything weaker than about minus 70 dBm is where intermittent drops start, and the fix is a node or a cable run, not a firmware update. And remember that a device which drops at night but not in the day is often not a Wi-Fi problem at all: it is infrared, a heater, or a simultaneous load on the supply.
Where this matters when you are buying
Check the hardware first: smart switches.
Panel standards, protocols and MOQ live on the Xingliao smart home factory site; panel families (86, 118, 147) are on the smart switch board manufacturing page. Sourcing questions go to the factory team.
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