Did Eth have the kind of network problems at the beginning of development that happened to Solana and Harmony?
None that I remember, but there where few problems in the past but there's no complete shutdown of the network itself. I think you can attribute it to Ethereum really that big that's why it never did go down. As compare to Solana or Harmony that is still very young and maybe just a few who support its network. Nevertheless it was a lessons learn for both of it so for sure they will not let it happened again in the future.