If got to agree. I can’t recall a pipe ever failing due to unreliability.
One issue I did used to have (before I discovered ‘-o pipefail’[1]) was the annoyance that if an earlier command in a pipeline failed, all the other commands in the pipeline still ran albeit with no data or garbage data being piped to them.
[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1550933/catching-error-c...
While this may be your experience, the mechanism of FIFO pipes in Unix (which is filehandles and buffers, basically), is an old one that is both elegant and robust; it doesn't "randomly" fail due to unreliability of the core algorithm or components. In 20 years, I never had an init script or bash command fail due to the pipe(3) call itself being unreliable.
If you misunderstand detailed behavior of the commands you are stitching together--or details of how you're transiting the network in case of an ssh remote command--then yes, things may go wrong. Especially if you are creating Hail Mary one-liners, which become unwieldy.