this is one very overlooked aspect of the classic Mac operating system that was light years ahead of Windows.
Eeeehhhhh.....
In practice, it was
quite difficult to clean up a System Folder until Extension Manager came along, and even then, few people actually bothered to do it. Long-living system folders, especially any that migrated from one machine to the next, along with changing software needs over the years is probably a lot of what caused system conflicts and to a certain extent, system unreliability.
We, of course,
do know Classic Mac OS can basically be unstable out of the box, but a system folder with a bunch of stuff in it from a mix of different eras that's never been cleaned or curated will naturally make things worse.
The other thing is, I feel like it's a relatively poor design overall that the Mac OS treats everything as loaded and active regardless of whether or not there's a good reason for it to be. In Windows, the TCP/IP stack isn't using memory if you aren't using it, so there's not a very great reason to rip it out of the OS.
In practice, too, most people on Windows didn't track down individual reliability problems. Either it was acceptable as it was or it was bad enough to take it to a shop and/or reformat it.
It really makes you wonder why Apple didn't have a larger marketshare,
Does it?
I thought the near-universal answer was price and availability. Macs were notoriously difficult to
actually buy throughout the '80s and '90s, and that's one of the reasons the Performa family began existing - to make it possible to buy a Mac at a store that might have been in or much closer to your particular town, and not in just the state's biggest major metro, or in some cases, a state over. Sears, for example, has way more retail locations in Oregon and Washington than The Computer Store, a Mac retailer that existed in Portland and Seattle. So, if you lived in, IDK, Yakima, you could go down the road a couple miles to the sears in Union Gap rather than having to plan a day or weekend out to Seattle or Portland.
Even in Union Gap, once you got to the sears, it's nearly completely inevitable that Packard Bell, HP, and Compaq had
something on display that was less expensive.
Mac should have been considered the OS of choice for people that didn't have many, if any, IT skills
I do think Mac OS'
potentially easier to learn filesystem layout meant that you could have application power users (people who really are only on the computer because they are good at one or two applications, usually as part of some greater trade) self-servicing with returning their system to a usable state after an incident occurs (for example, someone tries to install a new driver and the system crashes) but that doesn't really mean that the Mac was, in fact, any better for people who professed to have no skills.
You still have to get someone to have recovery media on hand, think about using it, and then be aware of how the system was organized, and if I'm remembering correctly, that particular information was not really in Apple's own user-facing documentation, you'd either need to buy a tips or "everything!" book (not necessarily a bad deal, they were like $25 and they went through
most relevant knowledge, and they made good references as well) or have someone describe the process over the phone.
So, yeah, "boot from that CD, navigate to your disk, go into extensions, sort by date, remove the three newest things" is easy to describe over the phone, (easier than editing autoexec/command or, as you say, navigating the registry) it's not any easier to intuit from zero knowledge that that's what you should do than it would be on DOS.
That and, to be perfectly honest, thinking about it, I view the entire practice of just stripping out parts of the OS you aren't using or don't like in order to save a few kilobytes of RAM a little.... indicative of the fact that Apple chronically under-equipped their machines. (Imagine buying a 7500 new in 1995 for like $2500 before the cost of a keyboard, display, or
any software and then having to disable the TCP/IP stack, the Ethernet driver, the printing stack, and any interesting features (Macintalk, AppleGuide, PowerTalk, QuickTime) in order to run whatever software caused you to buy a 7500, because it only came with 8 megs of RAM, just about enough to boot the OS.)
