Crashing has not been an issue on my deck. I’m 3 days shy of my 2 year anniversary with my steam deck. I can recall it crashing maybe 3 or 4 times, each of those linked to some custom game launcher and all in the default mode rather than desktop. For a while it used to hang when woken from sleep, but that hasn’t happened in 6 months so I assume was fixed in an update.
I’m using desktop for emulation and games from GOG and Epic.
Let’s not be too hasty to call it garbage when it could in fact turn out to be rancid dog shit.