I don't think it's more prevalent. I think it's more notable precisely because we've gotten so used to our devices and data being stable. Don't forget that in the past it was pretty much expected you'd lose or break something when upgrading your OS, and that you could pretty much count on physical hard drive failure resulting in data loss at some point in the life of your PC. BSOD's especially were almost certainly more prevalent in the bad old days of Windows. Looking just at Mac, don't forget about when PRAM resets were part of the normal debug flow.