It really was (though I can't speak for the people working on NeXT boxes and Sun Workstations, etc). It wasn't really a matter of if a given computer would become unstable and crash every day, but how many times and how much you would lose. Somehow I still developed a liking for computers, but even with the incredible increase in complexity which works against it, a $30 prepaid Android burner phone today is more stable and reliable (though it isn't more fast and responsive) than any Mac or PC introduced in the 90s.
Like many that lived through (survived?) that era of computing, I still periodically press command-S by reflex, without being consciously aware that I'm doing it.
If you had accounts on the NeXT machines, you wanted to work on your papers there, because it was much less likely to crash and take hours of work with it.
