I have used system restore successfully on plenty of occasions over the years, (Millenium I think, XP, Vista, 7 - haven't had to do it on Win 8.x as far as I can remember, and I only use 10 at work).
Most of the time system restore was used to sort out weird performance issues or settings changes which I don't think I had any involvement with...
Never had any problems with it, but the PCs are just home machines with nothing too complex on them, and they've never been in a particularly frightening mess before I've run it.