Just not being able to use one application is better than your whole OS going up in smoke every couple weeks. Yes, Windows 95A on the wrong hardware (and how would you know?) did that.

I mean, sure, although the crashes could sometimes come with data loss as well.

You might now ponder whether a broken login screen, i.e. temporarily not being able to access data, is maybe better than downright losing it, but my point was more that I sometimes get the feeling that earlier MS DOS/Windows OSes are now seen through some kind of nostalgia glasses, that seem to make the OSes much more stable and put together than they actually were.

In my experience, most somewhat mainstream OSes were much less shoddy. This includes various Unixes and Unix-likes, but also OS/2 (which was jointly developed by Microsoft, with IBM).