Sorry for the res, but I just had to add my €0,02 here.
I'll not start quoting all of the replies which have similar good experiences with ME, but I've had virtually all of these experiences myself.
I started out with a Pentium 2 with 98FE and it was almost impossible to actually do a lot of anything without it misbehaving up to the point I started suspecting my hardware might be broken somehow (I only ever had this pc back then, Iwazzan00b! 😁).
I really wanted something else (I basically wanted anything else!), but 98SE and 2k were very difficult to find and I somehow decided to buy some OEM ME still shrinkwrapped for €15 or so, installed this and even though it still had problems, it was one heck of an improvement over 98FE for me.
Later I learned to tweak it, but not by much as I was kinda paranoid about possibly loosing all of my data and I figured I would be better off doing all of my experimenting on another rig...which I didn't have at the time and this is actually one of the things that eventually evolved in me getting into (then not so very) retro rigs in the first place! 😁
I got some other spare hardware and eventually started completing more and more rigs and I learned to tweak ME, which was actually not a very hard thing to do (easily done in under an hour at a relaxed pace).
I ended up installing ME on dozens of rigs, ranging from mostly ss7 to Tualatin and Thunderbird (possibly also a lone s7 and also Athlon XP and Netburst, but those latter ones were probably not my own rigs) and all of the stuff I had heard about ME being so terrible...I wasn't seeing it! I heard and read about all the crashes I never experienced. I really didn't understand what all the bad rep for ME was about, it's even easier to manually tweak and get running than 98SE is if you ask me (Once I finally got 98SE, 98SE was really a big letdown as I expected 98SE to actually be an improvement...which in my experience it was not).
After having ME as my main OS on almost all of my rigs for years (I only finally got XP when Vista got released 🤣) I can say that ME is really as good as any 9x OS can get.
But one can't deny it's not the best 9x OS in everything. Even though I did play DOS games on ME (not using real DOS) and with mostly PCI sound cards, these mostly worked just fine (or at least to me, as an average user) but as I never had a DOS computer to call my own and knowing from other users here who were (and most often probably are) more savvy using DOS stuff, that DOS in 98SE is simply an improved experience compared to ME.
And some things in ME one really can go better without (like the system restore thing and a few other settings), just disable that extra crashy stuff ME has and 98SE lacks out of the box and it'll mostly be a harmless experience from there....for 9x that is.
But it is also true ME does eat a bit more memory compared to 98SE and a tad faster CPU will help when using rigs based on, say, pre-300MHz systems.
I'd personally use ME when theres more than 64MB RAM (cacheable) and the CPU is maybe 200MHz or so, but my recommended minimum specs would be to give ME a 266MHz CPU (K6-II should be enough) and 128MB RAM.
400MHz and 192MB RAM ran really well and very fast! (particularly booting and shutting down).
When it comes to the rest of the hardware, I'd perhaps recommend using ME when theres no ISA sound card (I'd perhaps personally prefer 98SE for rigs build around ISA sound and ME for PCI sound). Graphics cards seemed to run ME just fine, even Virge wasn't a problem iirc.
I'd personally have doubts about ME or XP when things start getting into the GHz range, but these days imo this range is actually climbing upwards a bit (XP on a 1GHz Coppermine with 512MB RAM wasn't very fast and ME was a rocket on similar hardware) and I'd mostly install XP over ME once the amount of RAM is 1GB or more.
2k I wouldn't personally use a lot, unless I needed it for some reason and XP would run too slow for my tastes (but I'd give 2k a lot more extra minimum RAM, like 384MB or more and preferably a CPU a tad faster than what I'd consider for ME)