Ahh, I’ll call bs on that. Reiserfs was an innovative fs at the time; in the current space, btrfs is in the same space. Stuff like tail packing and very good performance on small files (emails) made it a good fit for specific workloads.
Personally I have no interest in a filesystem being high performing or having interesting features if it murders your data. You might think otherwise now but after you have a serious wreck you might appreciate ext4. (Every total NTFS failure I had had to do with failing hardware but it does seem they are never the same if you make a directory with too many files.)