To understand the future, we first need to understand the past. Before switches, we had hubs where we would plug in all our devices; I am talking about a star topology using twisted-pair cabling.
The problem with using hubs is that they created one collision domain and one broadcast domain, there was no way of making it better, unless you physically segmented each network, which is insane.
Let's look at a star topology using hubs, so we can understand this concept better:
The star topology you see is using hubs. Every time someone transmits data, everyone is privileged to hear that noise on the network. This is considered to be a flat network structure, since it only has one broadcast domain.
To make matters worse, in an Ethernet network, the access method is CSMA/CD, meaning everyone is fighting for access to transmit, but since Ethernet uses the first...