Did this happen to you, or is this an urban legend?

This happened to various developers at my last workplace on a particular Windows update. I think some of them just reinstalled Windows.

Have had this experience with Windows 10 and OS X in the last two years.

You could argue the Windows issue is the fault of Samsung's migration assistant or the OS X issue was the fault of my employer's mdm software as both ultimately boiled down a partition layout that the updater wasn't anticipating, but OS X was unable to rollback and Windows _did_ rollback, but then immediately tried again with reapplying the update and restarting as it was past the "No really we're just going to update to the new feature release now" period.

Happened a few times, early Windows 10 days but enough to make me do a full switch.

Not an urban legend, it just happened to a colleague with Windows 10. She is now having to buy a new laptop.

clearly not an arch user

That's the distro with the giant text on the website saying it's a bleeding edge rolling release distro right?

but it does brick

Been there, done that, didn't get a T-shirt but a lot of scorn from IRC

Yeah, but then it is supposed to - you are expected to have knowledge to fix it as a user. And unlike proprietary OSes it gives you legible errors and great logging/debugging tools and a path to downgrade. Last time I had to help my friend troubleshoot his Windows setup all we would get would be an extremely cryptic error code and we solved it by finding a thread on an Italian forum and had to google translate a solution that consisted of creating an arbitrary entry in Windows registry. This is not comparable.

I think the difference is not between legible errors vs none, but how many people who deeply understand computers are in the community. So a community difference instead of a technical one. In Windows land, most folks don't understand it, so most you'll find on the internet is "I reinstalled windows, the problem is gone" and "try Pro Cleaner ^TM 2000, the trial version has some ads but it removed the problem for me. requires E-Mail signup though".

Windows is also far more difficult to debug in the first place. macOS has stuff like the defaults command in the Terminal and verbose mode that give power users the tools to debug issues. Even if the Mac-using community isn't super tech-savvy on average, the architecture of macOS means that you're left with "Something went wrong; please try again later" far less often.

The point is that it won't brick unless the sysadmin does something. Windows will occasionally brick itself with no user interaction.