I think it's just old tribal knowledge that people have turned into a meme at this point, just like people thinking all versions of Linux are so arcane and obtuse, you need to be a master programmer or hacker to be able to make it run without crashing. When I was first starting out with it, around 2009, I remember having somewhat regular issues with my sound and my wifi just randomly deciding I was unworthy of either sound or wireless internet access. That was across distros when I was initially checking things out, as well as across releases of the same distro once I (mostly) settled down.

These days, I can't remember the last time I had such problems that weren't either the result of a specific bug that was shortly fixed, or the fallout of something stupid I did myself while tinkering with something and not paying enough attention.