This[0] is one of my favorite articles ever, about the competition between IP and ATM in the 90s and the different mindsets they had.

[0] https://www.wired.com/1996/10/atm-3/

Netheads vs bellheads is an instance of the superiority of the end-to-end principle. https://web.mit.edu/Saltzer/www/publications/endtoend/endtoe...

ATM was the baselevel for DSL for a long time. You'd usually run Ethernet over ATM, and often PPP over Ethernet (over ATM). If you carefully tweaked your MTUs, you could get a marginal latency benefit by fully packing the underlying fixed-length ATM packets.