It is nowhere near necessary to reinstall the OS to fix anything… at least for Mint and Raspbian which are the two I’ve used over the last decade. I may have done an upgrade on mint a few times. Otherwise it chugged on merrily.

PS: now that I think about it I’ve never reinstalled windows on my old laptop either. I like to find the root cause of problems and fix them rather than giving up and reinstalling… call me crazy?