Never in my life have I needed to reimage any Linux machine, but I have had to reimage many, many, many windows machines and quite a few Apple devices too. I have a long career in IT (and even before that, I've been building computers since I was 12), so my sample size consists of thousands of computers going back decades. I've only ever reimaged Linux systems when I felt like distro hopping for fun. Maybe I've just been lucky, but I think it's probably more to do with the fact that Linux tends to be extremely reliable once you have it set up (unless you manage to break it, but even then there are usually multiple ways to fix it without reimaging).