It surely is different. We at least managed to contain some of the issues in normal operation. Back in the day, crashing whole OS in BSOD/panic style was more common, drivers unstable, things written in not-so-safe languages more popular.

So ultimately it depends what do you mean by reliable - by itself, functionality might not be so much better, but yes, sometimes you don't mind as much as you would do back then.

The internet wasn't as big and software frequently shipped as a boxed product on a disk, cartridge, or CD-ROM. You had one shot to get it right without major bugs because fixing them required another run of physical media.

Even in the late 90s, source code revision control was a dark art: either you used extremely expensive proprietary systems or else you used CVS which was very low level and completely lacked integration with any bug tracking system. Merging in a big feature in CVS was a nerve-racking experience.

There was more Pascal and more assembly language.

Some believe that Macintosh suffered a lot of instability from the switch to C from Pascal.

I don't have any source code to point to however, only anecdote.