And the "cooperative multitasking" in old operating systems where one program locking up meant the whole system was locked up

I guess that is because you run it on old hardware. When I've bought my Asus ROG expensive laptop I had bsod almost daily. A year later with all updates I had bsod once in a month on the same device and windows installation.

If you have faulty hardware no amount of software is going to solve your problems (other than software that just completely deactivates said faulty hardware).

The fact you continued to have BSOD issues after a full reinstall is pretty strong evidence you probably had some kind of hardware failure.

But there was no reinstall in my case. Years goes by and further in time there are less and less bsod.

My point is if you are using the same "old" modern hardware, bsod is very rare.

Ah, sorry, I misread your comment. Glad you're getting a better experience with your device over time!

Depends, if you install games with anti-cheat they can often conflict and cause BSODs.

It's why I don't play the new trackmania.

Still get them fairly regularly except now they come with a QR code.

Gone? I had two last year, lets not overstate things.

My anecdata is that my current PC is four years old, with the same OS install, and I can't even recall if I've seen one BSoD.

Daily+ occurrences to two in a year pretty much rounds to zero. Kind of like we said measles were eradicated because there was <X per year cases.

Mostly because Microsoft shut down kernel access, wrote it's own generic drivers for "simple" devices (USBs, printers, sound cards, ...) and made "heavy" drivers submit to their WHQL quality control to be signed to run.

They're definitely not gone.

I remember Linux being remarkable reliable throughout its entire life in spite of being rabidly worked on.

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.

As a Windows driver developer: LOL