Significant raise of reports

Not by everyone, so that would be better than nothing.

Define better.

Before 2000 fixing a bug the user would notice was expensive - you had to mail them a new disk/cd. As such there was a lot more effort put into testing software to ensure there were no bugs users would notice.

However before 2000 (really 1995) the internet was not a thing for most people. There were a few viruses around, but they had it really hard to propagate (they still managed, but compared to today it was much harder). Nobody worried about someone entering something too long in various fields - it did happen, but if you made your buffers "large" (say 100 bytes) most forms didn't have to worry about checking for overflow because nobody would type that much anyway. Note the assumption that a human was typing things on a keyboard into fields to create the buffer overflow. Thus a large portion of modern attacks weren't an issue - we are much better at checking buffer sizes now than there - they knew back then they should, but often got away with being lazy and not doing it. If a vulnerability exists but is never exploited do you care - thus is today better is debatable.

In the 1990s the US had encryption export laws, if you wanted to protect data often it was impossible. Modern AES didn't even exist until 2001, instead we had DES (when you cared triple DES which was pretty good even by today's standards) - but you were not allowed to use it in a lot of places. I remember the company I worked for at the time developed their own encryption algorithm for export, with the marketing(!) saying something like "We think it is good, but it hasn't been examined near as well as DES so you should only use it if you legally you can't use DES"

As an end user though, software was generally better. They rarely had bugs anyone would notice. This came at the expense of a lot more testing, and features took longer to develop. Even back then it was a known trade off, and some software was known to be better than others because of the effort the company put into making it work before release. High risk software (medical) is still developed with a lot of extra testing and effort today.

As for the second part - software back then was plenty complex. Sure today things are more complex, but I don't think that is the issue. In fact in some ways things were more complex because extra effort was put into optimization (200mhz CPUs were the top end expensive servers, most people only had around 90mhz, and more than one core was something only nerds knew was possible and most of them didn't have it). As such a lot of effort was put into complex algorithms that were faster at the expensive of being hard to maintain. Today we have better optimize rs and faster CPUs so we don't write as much complex code trying to get performance.

There are some rose-colored glasses when people say this.

Programs didn’t auto save and regularly crashed. It was extremely common to hear someone talk about losing hours of work. Computers regularly blue screened at random. Device drivers weren’t isolated from the kernel so you could easily buy a dongle or something that single-handedly destabilized your system. Viruses regularly brought the white-collar economy to its knees. Computer games that were just starting to come online and be collaborative didn’t do any validation of what the client sent it (this is true sometimes now, but it was the rule back then).

Of course, but killing the 80% of low hanging fruit is already valuable. The rest is an arms race like always.

It appeared better, because there were fewer features and more time to develop and test. But it's also a lot of nostalgia, because everything moved slower, the world was smaller, there was a lower standard; people will usually remember the later versions of a software, or never even encountered the earlier versions. Without the internet and every one bitching about every little detail, the general awareness was also different, not as toxic as today.