I have literally developed bespoke coping mechanisms around such scenarios

Jesus Saves... Early and often.

Phrase from the early 90's, when saving was often to a floppy, and systems were nowhere near as stable as today.

Control-S is your friend.

Unless you save too often and the file was in the middle of saving or loading something and the file corrupts. :)
- I've never seen that, and not sure how any system could be so badly designed to permit this.
  
  And I've been using systems since DOS 1.1 (and punched cards before that).
I had a computer lab teacher in the 90's that was known to tell really long stories, it could be a joke or a shaggy dog depending on his mood, but you wouldn't know until the end. "Jesus saves" was the punchline to one related to computers. I haven't thought about him years. Thanks for the reminder.
I think you're seriously overestimating modern stability.
- I don't think it's a question that modern systems are more stable; any belief otherwise is just pure nostalgia (or someone who wasn't actually working on computers in the early 90's). Plus, the advent of autosave truly was a game-changer.

*ignores other comments that already do so and attempts to educates you on the fact that you should have saved your work, thus positioning myself as your guide and mentor in my head to briefly drown out my insecurities and lack of purpose*

Who are you who are so wise in the ways of hindsight?

AutoSave is your friend.

Yeah, autosave is such a lifesaver, I enable it wherever I can, Blender, Krita, Inkscape, Scribus, Thunderbird, autosave it all! And do your backups!
- I keep versioned files around too.
  
  Any on-going work gets a new version daily. I start the day by saving current work to a new file, with the date/time in the file name:
  
  E.G. Project Name 2024-04-09_08-32.xls
  
  Using date with 24hr/military time like this enables sorting, and makes clear when the file was updated. This is especially useful iyou have to share a doc with peers - you never question what version they're looking at (can't always use a version control system).
Yep, and with seconds at best delays. Stopped typing or making changes for three seconds? Save!!

Though autosave kinda' requires a huge undo limit, at least for me when doing anything remotely artsy. I'm nowhere good enough to not make minutes-long mistakes.

I developed a habit to just hit ctrl + s every time I do something major... Saved me more than once :)

I'm not kidding when I say Windows has been much more stable when it comes to Adobe photoshop.

Premier, on the other hand, seems to be trying to destroy itself with all the crashes and bugs I get. It's worse every year, I swear.

Interesting choice of character for this meme. OP is a true man/woman of culture.