Almost 30 years for me, both on my personal machines and at work.

I went through a period about 25 years ago where apt crashed on my (rather janky) desktop almost every other run, and sometimes left my system in a state so inconsistent that I had to fall back on 'dpkg-reconfigure --force' and the like to fix it.

Turns out that it was due to a bad interaction between a failing stick of RAM and reiserfs' tail-packing feature, which was causing frequent silent corruption in /var/lib/dpkg/status and friends.

I don't think I've seen any similar issues since, across what must be many millions of apt runs I've been responsible for.

Perhaps gp is suffering from some similar underlying problem?