Comment by cmurf

Where I think you're seeing "that garbage file system" not eating your data has a lot to do with no crashes or power losses. It has evolved a good deal since HFS and even HFS+ days, no one uses either of those anymore. It's all HFSJ, with a scant number using HFSX.

20 years ago Mac OS crashed often, and had a file system not designed to account for that. OS X even shipped with non-journaled HFS+. It was only into the 3rd major release of OS X that journaling appeared. Data corruptions, I feel, dropped massively, because the OS didn't crash nearly as often, but did still crash. In the last 4-5 years I'd say I get maybe one or two kernel panics per year on OS X, which is a lot less than I get on Linux desktops. But even still on Linux desktops, I can't say when I've seen file system corruption not attributable to pre-existing hardware issues.