I don't think it's true that regular smoke detectors are inherently reliable. In newer apartment buildings that I've lived in, all of the units are hooked into a central fire alarm system. If a smoke detector goes off in one unit, the alarm goes off in all of them.

In practice it's often been a nightmare. Some places that I've lived, the fire alarm went off multiple times a day, almost every day. Presumably a lot of this is from people cooking or something, but given the frequency I don't think that could explain all of it.

I think in non-networked smoke alarm situations, people are just less aware of the false positives they generate.