Many people who worked on UNIX for years had plenty of experience with the kernel dumping core. I ran LINUX in the mid-90s and it wasn't extremely stable.
I ran Linux, too, starting from Slackware on a CD, graduating to Debian.
I don't know about your experience, but in my circles there was real tension between upgrading to a current kernel release, vs. maintaining your 180+ days uptime. I "apt dist-upgrade"-ed for well over a decade without a failure, through a half-dozen generations of host hardware.
Only during the period when the i915 display driver was still buggy did I ever have failures. Even then, I could SSH in.
So, compared to needing to reboot twice a day (common) or twice a week (lucky), and never once needing to reinstall, yes, it was extremely stable.
