Back in 2001 we got ext3, adding journaling to the most widely used filesystem on Linux - which can just roll back transaction on next mount, while previously you'd have to run fsck to get your filesystem back to a consistent state.

A non-journaling filesystem was easier to get into a state where things were broken in interesting ways, as a unclean unmount had a higher chance of impacting critical data.

In the early days of journaling filesystems fsck was also quite lacking - so when things got bad enough that you did need fsck there was a decent chance you'd end up in trouble.

Nowadays both robustness of the file systems as well as quality of fsck have greatly improved.