IMO Win98 is highly unstable here, the average components sold did not change when XP took over the market, but suddenly computers crashed way way less - for a small time at least, until those 'users' started getting Internet malware. But that woe of XP age doesn't mean that NT isn't miles above the old win32 kernels.
What alternate timeline did you live in? Components sold were worlds apart between the Win98 and XP era. CPU clock speeds quite literally tripled and then some in that time span. Dumb video cards turned into programmable GPUs. Computers were advancing so fast that the joke of the time was you could buy a PC today and it would be completely obsolete the next day. There were even commercials about it.
XP had worse stability problems because of hardware failure, as the capacitor plague was ramping up and then the EU ROHS directive hit in 2005/2006 and things were bad for the next decade.
Windows 98 *could* be unstable if misconfigured, but it could also be very stable if configured correctly. The two primary culprits that made 98 unstable was the dual driver model, where you had VxDs side by side with WDM. VxDs allowed direct hardware access, so you had the undesirable condition where a DOS/Windows program and driver could be directly competing with the Windows kernel for access to a device. The next was the cooperatively multitasked kernel, misbehaving applications could take the whole system down. If you could avoid using VxD drivers and avoid badly made applications, Windows 98 ran fairly well. That is until CPUs got too fast and started creating race conditions all over the OS, but Microsoft can't really be blamed for that. Timing sensitive code had been a problem for a very long time by that point, and it was rarely ever fixed. At least Microsoft tried to fix it with patches, the same can't be said for many other applications. You had to work around it.
Like you, I fixed a ton of broken Windows 98 systems, but there were also plenty of them that didn't actually have that many problems. I had several Windows 98 servers that gave me years of reliable service.
I know that today 98SE is cherished on the Internet, maybe most of you guys had top brand components.
Are you kidding? I was poor, I had hand-me-down garbage and antiquated gear my dad bought me from 1997 well into the early 2000s. What was a top of the line system in 1997 was completely inadequate by 2001. Even when I could afford to buy something, it was low budget bottom of the barrel parts. My best system for the longest time was a Super Micro P3TDDE with dual PIII 1000s that I got *very* cheap because it was a demo system that was going to be scrapped. I was in the right place at the right time.
But even with all of that low spec hardware, I had fairly few problems because I knew how to configure it properly. Going into the XP era, I had far more trouble than I ever did in the 98 era due to the aforementioned capacitor plague and ROHS hardware failures. My board level repair knowledge at the time was very low, so unfortunately a lot of things that were otherwise fixable went into the trash.
