Desktop Linux is easily the least-stable OS I use with any regularity. It was my main OS from something like '01-'10, but after I finally gave OS X a try, and since Windows got its shit together some time late in the WinXP service pack cycle (or, arguably, Win2k, but that wouldn't run my games) and stopped crashing all the time, it's really hard to justify using desktop Linux.
Does the OS hard lock or completely crash? No... unless you have graphics drivers issues, which isn't unlikely. Then, oh man, yes, lots. X/Wayland crashes that restart the window server? Yep. Applications crashing pretty regularly or glitching out so badly they have to be restarted, including the basic applications distributed with the heavier DEs? Yep. And it turns out that your windowing environment crashing or the main program you're currently using crashing is really close to as bad as the whole machine blue-screening in Windows, from the perspective of the user. Using Linux makes me anxious, even though I very much know WTF I'm doing with it. MacOS and even (spits) Windows don't do that to me, any more. Now that I've experienced not feeling that way, I can't go back. I go years between work-lost crashes of any sort at all on MacOS. Linux, one month without such a thing would be miraculous.
If you build up from almost nothing and keep things very minimal and have very boring and stable old hardware, and do as much as possible from the command line, it can be kinda OK, but it's a lot of work to set something up like that, and ongoing effort every time you do something manually that'd be automatic or trivial on a more full-featured GUI desktop. If you start with something like Ubuntu or Fedora standard desktop installs, though, there's just too much that can go wrong, and it will, with some frequency.
I could tolerate some hardware or workflows not working and things generally being a little less convenient, maybe, if it were rock solid, but it's very far from that. The main problems seem to be that its entire graphics stack is incredibly fragile (Wayland doesn't seem to have done much, if anything, to fix that) and it's way too easy for a glitchy driver to screw up the whole system.
I've switched to Linux from Mac OS about 2 years ago, being frustrated by memory consumption, slowdowns and freezes. After trying a couple of distributions / DEs, I've settled on Manjaro (Arch based) and KDE. Delighted with flexibility, features and general performance and stability. While, before, I was constantly tempering with the environment and changing stuff and there was always "something missing", I've found myself not needing to touch configuration or change anything in my workflow for more than a year now...I did have some glitches and CPU usage issues when playing YT videos on Intel-based graphics, but have since been using Lenovo laptops with Ryzen 4000 and 5000, and it's been flawless without any tempering. P14s Gen 2 AMD (5850U + 32GB RAM) is the best laptop I have ever used (software development), and I change them A LOT...
AMD graphics on Linux nowadays are vastly more stable than anything else. NVIDIA is proprietary crap and Intel Graphics still have cross-platform bugs so often is almost comical.
The experience you are describing is more akin to what I remember being Linux in the '00s than nowadays. I run a machine with arguably a buggy Ryzen 1st gen motherboard (it's quite buggy on Windows too), and I have a very stable desktop experience with Arch Linux and KDE Plasma. The real game changer has been AMDGPU, I'm yet to have any sort of graphical issue with an RX 580 on Linux, and Plasma is arguably quite solid nowadays.
The only issue I had recently were audio issues which were both due to my buggy soundcard and a bug in Pipewire. Excluding that, I've had almost no issues with desktop Linux since 2017.
I think your experience is not universal. I would say windows has been far less reliable than linux on my thinkpad machine, but overall I have to say that I have yet to use an OS that never crashed on me, all software of this complexity is buggy.
Does the OS hard lock or completely crash? No... unless you have graphics drivers issues, which isn't unlikely. Then, oh man, yes, lots. X/Wayland crashes that restart the window server? Yep. Applications crashing pretty regularly or glitching out so badly they have to be restarted, including the basic applications distributed with the heavier DEs? Yep. And it turns out that your windowing environment crashing or the main program you're currently using crashing is really close to as bad as the whole machine blue-screening in Windows, from the perspective of the user. Using Linux makes me anxious, even though I very much know WTF I'm doing with it. MacOS and even (spits) Windows don't do that to me, any more. Now that I've experienced not feeling that way, I can't go back. I go years between work-lost crashes of any sort at all on MacOS. Linux, one month without such a thing would be miraculous.
If you build up from almost nothing and keep things very minimal and have very boring and stable old hardware, and do as much as possible from the command line, it can be kinda OK, but it's a lot of work to set something up like that, and ongoing effort every time you do something manually that'd be automatic or trivial on a more full-featured GUI desktop. If you start with something like Ubuntu or Fedora standard desktop installs, though, there's just too much that can go wrong, and it will, with some frequency.
I could tolerate some hardware or workflows not working and things generally being a little less convenient, maybe, if it were rock solid, but it's very far from that. The main problems seem to be that its entire graphics stack is incredibly fragile (Wayland doesn't seem to have done much, if anything, to fix that) and it's way too easy for a glitchy driver to screw up the whole system.