And, of course, in the early 00's those habits got ingrained into init scripts. Every distro would automatically run a fsck after a forced shutdown, and sync after the heaviest deamons were stopped.

Somehow, I remember filesystems to be more reliable by them, and the time needed for the fsck being the biggest issue. Then we had a Red Hat person demonstrate a forced reboot in a computer running ReiserFS in my university, and I think in the next month no computing student was suing Ext2 anymore.