To give you a real life example, just last week I was trying to get my Win10 laptop to do local DNS lookups successfully. (I run dnsmasq on my home LAN, and I have it resolve names like "router" or "server" or whatever.) Not a problem on Linux or MacOS, but on Windows it's often a problem. Why? I don't know. There are all kinds of different ways Windows looks up names -- NetBIOS, WINS, DNS, etc., and they interact unpredictably from where I sit. I'm not the only one with this problem so I found a lot of blog and Stackoverflow posts with various fixes. I applied one of them by adding "." to the end of all local lookups. Seemed to work just fine.
Two nights ago it stopped working. Then I rebooted. That made it work again. Last night it stopped working. I rebooted. Nope. Local DNS is no more.
Why? I have no clue. So I'll just go try some other random fix to see if it works.
This process of applying random fixes should seem familiar to anybody who troubleshoots black boxes. I really don't want my OS to be this much of a black box.
When I was first reading your comment I assumed it was experience in the distant past. The different experiences people have with the same software is incredible to me. I have owned four Windows computers, up to present day, and maintained those of family and some friends, and not once have I had to reinstall Windows since the days of Windows 2000, excepting harddrive failures. I always wonder what makes the difference.
But I guess if I knew, Microsoft would know (being staffed by people smarter and more informed than me), and hopefully fix whatever causes the problems necessitating reinstall.
It's like all the complaints about Firefox's memory usage - people have complained about it for years, it's clearly a real problem for some? many? users, but I have never seen it on any platform.