The could happen and they definitely did but I don't remember this level of frustration and flakiness since (as noted) the early Plug and Play days. Pre Plug a

The could happen and they definitely did but I don't remember this level of frustration and flakiness since (as noted) the early Plug and Play days. Pre Plug and Play you had to have a cheat sheet of IRQ assignments and memory ranges next to any computer so you had a halfway decent chance of getting a new ISA expansion card to work. The early days of Plug and Play were reminiscent of USB-C today - as I noted plug it in and hope (Plug and Pray). However, from my anecdotal experience the reliability of Plug and Play advanced very rapidly and within a few years it was extremely clear to anyone that this was a significant step. Fast forward to now and you have PCIe with rapidly increasing speeds, a thoughtful connector design, and variable lane support. All with backward compatibility and downgrade of lanes and speed. Sure I've had a few issues (mostly in the early days) with weirdly wired slots and devices refusing to come up at max supported revision and lane configurations. But at least in those few limited experiences I've never had PCIe not work or have any fundamental reliability issues.