I don't think it was better, but it was generally less buggy or higher quality for sure. And I think it's both because of testing and because of lower complexity.

For example, desktop apps are actually much less complex than web based applications. It doesn't really seem that way, but web apps are distributed, with a client and server on separate machines. That, to me, introduces a whoooole new layer of error conditions and flakiness.

Also, QA has been largely cast aside. Nobody is really doing manual click-around type testing, and nobody is writing user guides anymore.