The fact you continued to have BSOD issues after a full reinstall is pretty strong evidence you probably had some kind of hardware failure.
My point is if you are using the same "old" modern hardware, bsod is very rare.
It's why I don't play the new trackmania.
Windows is only stabilizing because it's basically dead. All the activity is in the higher layers, where they are racking their brains on how to enshittify the experience, and extract value out of the remaining users.
There were plenty of other issues, including the fact that you had to adjust the right IRQ and DMA for your Sound Blaster manually, both physically and in each game, or that you needed to "optimize" memory usage, enable XMS or EMS or whatever it was at the time, or that you spent hours looking at the nice defrag/diskopt playing with your files, etc.
More generally, as you hint to, desktop operating systems were crap, but the software on top of it was much more comprehensively debugged. This was presumably a combination of two factors: you couldn't ship patches, so you had a strong incentive to debug it if you wanted to sell it, and software had way fewer features.
Come to think about it, early browsers kept crashing and taking down the entire OS, so maybe I'm looking at it with rosy glasses.
Last year I assembled a retro PC (Pentium 2, Riva TNT 2 Ultra, Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold) running Windows 98 to remember my childhood, and it is more stable than what I remembered, but still way worse than modern systems. There are plenty of games that will refuse to work for whatever reason, or that will crash the whole OS, specially when existing, and require a hard reboot.
Oh and at least in the '90s you could already ship patches, we used to get them with the floppies and later CDs provided by magazines.
As I mess around with these old machines for fun in my free time, I encounter these kinds of crashes pretty dang often. Its hard to tell if its just the old hardware is broken in odd ways or not so I can't fully say its the old software, but things are definitely pretty unreliable on old desktop Windows running old desktop Windows apps.
But I was thinking of the (not particularly) golden days of MS-DOS/DR-DOS/Amiga/Atari applications.
Or debuggers that would take out the entire OS.
Or a bad driver crashing everything multiple times a week.
Or a misbehaving process not handing control back to the OS.
I grew up in the era of 8 and 16 bit micros and early PCs, they where hilariously less stable than modern machines while doing far less, there wasn’t some halcyon age of near perfect software, it’s always been a case of things been good enough to be good enough but at least operating systems did improve.