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It isn't the forward assist that makes them more reliable.

The 5.56 mm NATO cartridge is ever so slightly larger that the .223 Remington that it is supposedly identical to. Colt refused to share its engineering drawings with the other manufacturers also contracted to supply the M-16 rifle, so those other manufacturers reverse-engineered the design but built them with a .223 rather than a 5.56 chamber.

Every manufactured item has allowable tolerances + or - however much, rifle chambers and ammunition included. Whenever the tolerances stacked up unfavorably, i.e. a chamber on the small end of the allowable tolerance (that was designed for a smaller cartridge anyway) and a round that was on the large end of the allowable tolerance, that was a recipe for disaster. Compounding the problem, the first M-16s were sold to the government as being self-cleaning so no cleaning kits were purchased or issued.

Small chamber + large round = jam.
Dirty weapon = jam.
Small chamber +Dirty weapon + large round = catastrophic jam.

The millitary soon figured out that cleaning kits were needed and started issuing them. The problem abated somewhat, but the small chamber/ large round issue still existed. Some enterprising armorers figured out that they could polish out the chambers of their rifles (I think they used a peice of brillo pad on a drill) to enlarge them by the few .0001" that was necessary and their problems went away.

Once the engineering and training problems were fixed, the M-16 became an extremely reliable weapon and the American GI in fact came to like it very much. Unfortunately, the rifle's early poor reputation still persists among the uninformed today.

Every - and I mean EVERY - malfunction Of an M-16 I ever saw in 7 1/2 years of active duty was caused by a dirty weapon. I can't believe that the old saw about the M-16/ AR-15 being prone to jam is still going around after more than 40 years. If you keep it clean, that platform is absolutely reliable.

No way. No. Never.