That was largely hardware issues. In particular without a way to negotiate between drivers conflicts were doomed to happen regardless of who was writing the driver, especially with the relatively small number of resources to pull from.
Yeah, PC clones were a right mess. The ISA bus was extremely primitive, even by the standards of the day. There is a reason the PCI bus was such a breath of fresh air.
How well did that work in the past when for profit companies had a motivation to write good drivers? You think it’s going to be a seamless mass market experience this time?
I don't see the connection. Two things appear to be true: 1. In the past, it was common to publish actual specs for talking to hardware. 2. In the past, drivers often sucked. You appear to be claiming that the first thing caused the second, but I can't see any reason for that to follow. It's not like hardware manufacturers couldn't, or indeed didn't, write their own official drivers, and on the other hand there's no reason to believe that a 3rd-party driver written using proper hardware docs wouldn't work well. In fact, it's quite reasonable to suggest that the improvement in quality is entirely tied to overall architecture improvements, mostly (as cousin comments point out) device enumeration standards and possibly OS improvements (preemptive multitasking and memory protection).
And how slow was the evolution of both Windows and the entire ecosystem compared to Apple that could release an OS, the hardware and the drivers simultaneously? When Apple releases new hardware it can upgrade everything in tandem. It’s especially apparent now that everything Apple sells runs some variant of the same processor from the AirPods, Watches, tablets, TV set top boxes, phones and even monitors?
