Nonetheless, despite repeatedly setting them up, my ("hacked" to have a ton more games, so the content available is extensive and excellent) NES and SNES classics have seen perhaps twenty hours of play between them in (IIRC) about four years, purely because corded controllers are so annoying that every time I think of playing them, I change my mind when I think about untangling the cords and having to adjust where I sit in the room and all that.
I've had nearly zero problems with any 1st-party wireless controllers since they became standard; they've been nothing but an improvement—but, I've lived in detached houses that whole time, so maybe it's just because I've been in relatively low-EM-noise environments.
I do recall friends complaining about reliability on e.g. the Wavebird and other non-standard wireless controllers, on earlier consoles, but I only ever used wired controllers for those generations.