It's just taken me 55 minutes to watch a 35 minute episode on Plex because of crashes
I put on an episode of a show I'm watching, and about ten minutes into it, I missed something on screen, so pressed the skip back button on my remote. The spinning loading circle came up, but stayed for a while, and the episode froze at the point where I'd pressed the button.
No problem I thought, I haven't used Plex for a while, it might just need a little kick. I restarted my fire stick, and restarted the Plex server, just in case. A few minutes later, I didn't catch what a character said, so I tried skipping back again. Plex crashed again. Another set of restarts and we're watching again.
About 15 minutes later, the episode just freezes. No error message or warning, just a frozen screen. I gave it a minute and pressed play, and Plex crashed back to the episode selection screen. Pressing play worked again for a few minutes, until I got an error on screen telling me that my network is too slow for the video. It's a less than 1080p video streaming at 10 Mbps over a gigabit connection. This time, reopening the video took me back to the point of the last issue.
I completely understand venting vs wanting solutions...
But sometimes I can't help myself. There are a whole host of things that could cause this. Happy to suggest things to test if you want, or there's an easy way to try an alternative. Have you considered giving Jellyfin a shot?
I've been holding off switching to Jellyfin for a while because I paid for a Plex pass, but I'm getting to the point where that's not going to stop me from swapping.
Plex is definitely more straightforward to maintain remote access to your content (including library sharing with friends & family). So it may be worth keeping up for that aspect alone, even if you end up liking Jellyfin better.