The 286 worked perfectly fine as an improved 8086, for running MS-DOS, an OS designed for 8088/8086, not for 286.

Nobody has ever used the 286 "protected mode" in the way intended by its designers.

The managers of "extended memory", like HIMEM.SYS, used briefly the "protected mode", but only to be able to access memory above 1 MB.

There were operating systems intended for 286, like XENIX and OS/2 1.x, but even those used only a small subset of the features of the 286 "protected mode". Moreover, only a negligible fraction of the 286 computers have been used with OS/2 1.x or XENIX, in comparison with those using MS-DOS/DR-DOS.