There is an almost invisible piece of technology, which might suddenly become very important for the growing industry of LEO space stations. The part which was considered before, then got "simplified out", and in the ISS period it was made operationally redundant - and so, to save funds, indefinitely shelved. But with new commercial offerings coming, and everything being different and therefore many things questioned, it might be thrust into the limelight again.
I'm talking about lifeboats.
The concept is familiar, just like the name - we used to have miscellaneous, smaller ships onboard of larger ocean-faring vessels for the purposes of extra safety - so if something happens with the big ship, like it did with Titanic, we'd have smaller ships readily available to help us reach a safe shore. Just like that, in a large space station, if something really bad happens in space, we'd like to have an option of evacuate the station, and reach safety with some smaller vehicles. NASA had a program, CRV/X-38, where the vehicle was intended to serve as the lifeboat for ISS. This program was cancelled in 2002, it was considered too expensive and at the same time Soyuz-TMA vehicle was conveniently available, so there was no immediate need for a dedicated lifeboat. The lifeboat is needed if the vehicle which brought the crew to the station leaves, and the crew remains on the station. But with retirement of the Space Shuttle in 2011 there was no vehicle which wasn't able to just stay at the station - first it was Soyuz, and then, after 2020, SpaceX's Crew Dragon was added to the role as well. So, if we always have the vehicle which we arrived in available, we don't need a lifeboat - to leave, we can just use the same spacecraft we came in.
There are drawbacks for this approach though. For example, both Soyuz and Crew Dragon have some limited mission time - they can't indefinitely hang in space. Crew Dragon is reusable, but while serving on ISS, it can't fly other crew - it's busy on the station. For reasons like that it might be useful to reconsider an option of having dedicated lifeboats on a new station being built, and use the crew transport as just the transport.
Lifeboats can be optimized to stay in space for long time, way longer than today's capsules. Lifeboats don't need some features of standalone spaceships - e.g., they don't need to fly to space with people onboard, so e.g. flight abort system isn't needed. All resources to maintain readiness on orbit can come from the station - thermal, electrical, some communications, so the lifeboat itself might be cheaper. It could be better integrated with the station. For example, if we want to bring people to the station on a modern equivalent of the Space Shuttle - like Starship - it's harder to justify keeping that multifunctional and large spaceship continuously attached to the station. So, when a station is designed from scratch, the option of lifeboats surfaces again.