Wintel boxes through the 1990s and 2000s coped with a much more diverse range of hardware and related drivers than the Mac ecosystem has ever had, and while certainly there was the occasional glitch, the track record was dramatically better for a very long time than what we see today.
This idea that widespread failures are somehow acceptable and to be expected is a bizarre change in mindset that seems to have taken hold in the 2010s. It is not in any way inevitable. It is just a result of poor specification and standardisation, bad programming, and rushing junk to market for commercial reasons when it isn't up to the standards we used to expect, often with some vague promise that any flaws will be corrected by on-line updates later.
I'm increasingly of the view that the Internet has actually been the worst thing that has ever happened to the software industry. It should be a huge advantage, but in reality it is often used as an excuse to ship bad code early and to impose unwanted updates, rent-an-app pricing models, and other user-hostile strategies.
If anyone still made software that does an important job well and comes with meaningful long-term support, my businesses would be throwing so much money at them right now. Sadly, hardly anyone making core business software actually does. It appears that I am part of a small minority, and so many people are willing to accept and pay for substandard junk that this has become the dominant software business model of this decade.
The most frustrating thing is that, since apparently there aren't enough of us for our money to swing things back in a more quality-driven direction, it's not clear what any of us can do constructively to make things any better now. Maybe when things reach their logical conclusion and people are actually dying because some 13-year-old script kiddie accidentally crashed their car by remote control, the wider public will finally get the message and start demanding acceptable quality again.
Perhaps rose colored glasses? I've used those Wintel systems and dealing with new and unexpected issues, with drivers, software, peripherals etc, was a day to day occurence.
It still is now, judging from Wintel friends I have, including my parents and siblings. It's just that in Wintel world there so many vendors and combinations of components, that no PC system has a multi-million units production run that a Mac has. Even for a company that pushes lots of units, like Dell, they offer 40+ different configurations at any point in time...
The only other big drop in compatibility that I can remember from recent years was when MS effectively moved to a different model for handling device drivers with Windows 7, which broke backward compatibility with some older devices whose vendors didn't always issue new Windows 7 drivers to replace the broken ones.
Still, considering that this was the first such change for many years and it's hardly reasonable to expect an OS developer to support the drivers for every hardware peripheral ever used on that OS, I don't think that's a bad track record.
Not really inexplicably: different graphics and airport cards (in different Mac models), different wi-fi routers, some have installed BS haxies while others have not, some have updated their OS on top of the previous installation for 3-4 OSes, where others start from a clean slate, etc. Regarding Hangout, it's also different iOS device version, proximity to the phone, etc.