The industry is trying to establish unified communication standards for laboratory and bioprocess equipment in the last years, for example LADS and SILA. But these need to be adopted by the market and only the newest hardware will support them Like in any other industry you will always have existing older equipment and manufacturers that implement their own proprietary protocols. So the short answer is: in practice you need to know about all sorts of hardware and protocols...
I work for a bioreactor manufacturer that needs to comply with a whole zoo of regulations (FDA, GMP, GAMP, iSO 13485 to name a few). Reliability, correctness of data, cyber security etc. etc. become more important day by day. That's why I'm only using OPC UA and the companion standards for all internal and external communications.