I never has a 386, but found 486s to work Great!
I go back to 286s. Didn’t own one but used them at work. First purchased PC I believe was a 486.
Yes it is incredible what NASA accomplished with the tools at their disposal.
With proper management and a real focus on engineering instead of politics NASA could still be pretty good.
In 1982, Built my first PC was a Z80, with a whole 64k of ram. (that was all the 8 bit processor could address.)
I still have it.