the Dell TB16 is just about the worst docking station I've ever used and that was Thunderbolt 3, and their USB-C equivalent (WD16 iirc) worked flawlessly.
Likely if you tore down the TB16 you would find the chip mentioned in TFA.
I've dealt with a number of these docks. And yeah, it's a Realtek NIC on them, and it's a total piece of crap. Endless issues with these docks, firmware updates, new drivers constantly... None of it ever helps.
I tried using it on my Mac. But it's on some kind of an Apple blacklist and won't work on Macs. There was some way to enable it, by turning off system protection or some shit... But even then, you could not get all the functionality.
I have never gotten the TB16 to work on anything other than Dells of around the same era. I don't think it's Apple blacklisting it, but rather the dock whitelisting things.
No when you plug it into a Mac, it literally says "Unsupported" in the system report and will not work. When I got it partly working at one point, I had to edit some kind of system file that basically allowed the device to be used. And it still didn't work well.
