Everyone I knew with an iMac had a toothpick or paper clip in the top handle, due to how common they needed to press the reset hole.
At the time my father used to edit a local news paper in PageMaker and it was particularly bad.
I went to a middle school that was "mac only" in the 90s. They were complete and utter crap.
They crashed constantly. The spinning pizza of death made a near hourly appearance.
We had two machines issued to each classroom, and most times the kids wouldn't even turn them on they were so bad.
What kind of Mac were you running?
The straightened paperclip was only there to eject recalcitrant floppy disks (early on), and then recalcitrant CDs later
Restarting the machine was always a menu option or physical button
Never heard of someone needing to reset any of them with a paperclip before