alt Hacker Newstwo or three months ago, I played a game that did exactly what you proposed, V-Rising, it have a server browser, I played a week with friend on a busy server. Then the server was gone for two weeks. When it was back, mosts of the bases were gone due to inactivity.
That's the kind of things that were common too, maybe you forgot about it.
All the multiplayer games I play today are either community server based, or I exclusively interact with private lobbies.
My negative experiences with community servers represent a pretty short list. Sometimes servers die, but games die sometimes, too. That's obviously only an issue with persistent-state games, like Minecraft, but it's unfortunate when it happens. Can't say it was so frequent that it impacted my enjoyment of any games as a whole.