My anecdote is that that has never happened to me and all IMAP clients seem fairly stable to me. Do with that information what you will.
Anyway, It has been some years since I last used IMAP. I had issues with Outlook, Thunderbird and Nylas N1 while connecting to Gmail, Exchange and Office365. It was a fairly small mailbox getting about 20k mail a year and keeping about half of that. Usually moving about 5k mail around at a time (end of year).
It got so bad that I had to get familiar enough with the IMAP protocol to make my own client program to handle deduplication overnight. Shortly after that I decided to just give up on trying to keep thinks organized.
I am in Australia and this was before the NBN, so obviously it was always on shitty connections.