There is some truth in that. Like I said, I'm a fan, but I also remember some painful times where we were missing a physical terminator and at least twice adding a new device and had to check the jumpers on everything and someone one of the jumper blocks were upside down or maybe we couldn't tell which pin was 1 or something such that the devices were numbered wrong. We got it fixed and working every time though.

Aside from the time we lost a terminator for a few days, I never once felt like the scsi system couldn't work, it was just a matter of a really young me and my dad getting it sorted out. IRQ/DMA/ISA fuckery? There were multiple times I can remember getting a shiny new piece of hardware, that took months of begging my parents, and after getting things assembled thinking that "this configuration of devices" might not be possible to make work together.