It’s not really about emacs, but the fact that it relies on software being available on $PATH. You could use proxy scripts for stuff that are in containers, but yeah, it’s flaky.

I’ve not encountered OS crashes for a long time, and I’m fairly confident on troubleshooting config issues. Image based OS could be fine for single purpose computing, but I tinker a lot on my PC. Anything that is declarative is usually an hassle.