As a user of the old Mac OS 8 I had no idea what the cause was. I just knew that once I ran into the spinning wheel of doom I was likely to have to reboot. Again.
Preemptive multi-tasking is worse in every way except that one. I mean that you get more bugs, have more overhead from locking, less throughput, and so on. But when the application runs into trouble, the operating system is still able to react to you.
Windows/286 (from long before Windows 3) could multitask too, but not very stably. No memory protection.
Acorn RISC OS -- the original ARM OS -- had _both_ cooperative and (for command-prompt windows) pre-emptive multitasking, but again, no memory protection.
A big part of the problem was that the 68000 had no MMU. Nor did the 68010 or the 68020. One only came onboard as standard with the 68030 -- analogous to Intel's 80386DX -- and then it was too late: to rework all the existing OSes would have been both a huge amount of work, and badly broken backwards-compatibility with the large existing software libraries.
Whereas the PC industry more or less rebooted the OS stack (eventually), with a new, graphical OS that could use the hardware multitasking features of the 386 if it got one, and do without if it didn't.
This was Windows 3, and it evolved into Windows 9x. Meanwhile in the background Microsoft frantically worked on turning OS/2 3, the CPU-independent version, into something saleable.
OS/2 3 became OS/2 NT became Windows NT and the rest is history.