1911’s can be quite reliable, but there is a huge difference between them and any Glock; every Glock is made by the exact some company, on the same machines, to the same specs, with the same materials. 1911’s can very from maker to maker, and there are ton of those out there. So, 1911’s as a whole lack consistency.
Then you have the 1911 end user messing around with parts, mods, and upgrades that they have no business messing around with. Some of the stuff I’ve seen show up........
The only parts of a 1911 that I have found to be truly “drop in” are grips and magazines. At some point in time, I’ve had to fit every other part.
I competed in USPSA Single Stack for years. The 1911 I used was a Springfield Armory TRP. I changed out the grips, mag well, rear sight, and tuned the trigger and extractor. In all my years of competing and practicing with that gun, I had exactly 3 malfunctions; one was due to a bad round that I handloaded, one to a bad CMC magazine, and the third when the hammer fell to half cock while firing because I had set the trigger too light. All 3 were remedied by me; I paid more attention to the ammo I loaded, replaced the bad magazine, I added 1/8 pound to the sear spring. This was on a handgun that I had set up for competition use only. This means that it had mods that I wouldn’t have done on a carry gun because, while they made it a dream to shoot, they sacrificed reliability. In a competition gun for me, reliability is second to accuracy, within reason. In a carry gun, reliability is king and top of my list.
Nowadays you have a lot of companies making cheap 1911’s. I’ll admit to being a 1911 snob, the TRP is the cheapest base 1911 I own. After I finished competing with it, I dropped it off to John Harrison for about $1600 of work.
Nowadays in my handgun courses, the handgun that I see malfunction the most is the Glock. Why? In nearly every case that I see, they are Glocks that the end user has performed a bunch of mods on. When your G17 is malfunctioning at least 1 on every drill, you have a serious issue. Too many folks watching too many YouTube videos on “25 cent trigger job on your Glock” and similar.