I, too, work in a similar type of company, and can confirm from experience that Linux can get just as absolutely fucked up by a bad kernel module as windows.

And it's not just changes to the module that can cause things to go wrong.

For example, the kernel released alongside the latest Ubuntu LTS included a change that conflicted with our module behaviour, so machines with that kernel or newer would panic on boot.

It was a super minor change, but when you're deep in the weeds, it's really easy for these things to be brittle. But that's just an inherent consequence of the fact that this sort of stuff is intrinsically low-level interaction with the OS itself.