Why does restarting your computer/ phone work most of the time?

This is something that I have pondered for many years and never really understood why simply turning something off and then turning it back on again will mostly fix whatever issues you are having with an electronic device. We joke about this with cars and everything else but it never really seems to work on anything except computers. It always has for the most part and I never really bothered to look into why that is.

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A buddy recently shared an easy to understand example of why it is that this process works and it stuck with me. I'll be paraphrasing and it wouldn't surprise me at all if it wasn't even his original thoughts but it stuck with me and it kind of makes sense. It goes a little something like this.

Imagine that you are leaving your house in a town that you have lived in for a long time. You are very familiar with a lot of the city but not all of it. GPS doesn't exist and you only have a basic idea of how to get to where the destination is. You get quite a lot of the way to the destination but then simply find yourself hopelessly lost, you spend a lot of time driving around in circles but never actually getting to the destination. In your frustration you start driving more erratically and even trying backstreets or one way streets that get you even further away from what your final destination is. You no longer know any of your surroundings and are basically just wasting time at this point.

Now, given this situation, does it make more sense to continue to drive around in circles until you run out of gas and the car eventually switches off, or would it make more sense to go back to the start, an area that you are familiar with, and have another try at making it to the destination with a better idea in mind?

Maybe that doesn't make total sense but I thought it was a pretty decent real-world example of why it is that a freshly restarted computer or mobile phone has a much better opportunity to give a desired result. I would imagine there are some computer nerds out there that actually DO know what is causing the problem and can fix it, but I don't think that this is a very large percentage of the population. For me, restarting from the beginning and having another try at whatever it is that I am doing seems like a much better choice that just getting increasingly frustrated or even getting the task manager involved.