The honest answer for most people who have been in Bitcoin long enough is yes — and the recoverable mistakes are usually different from the catastrophic ones in instructive ways.

Recoverable category: stuck transactions due to fee underpayment. RBF or CPFP turns these from "lost funds" into "delayed funds." Most modern wallets handle this transparently, but the older school of fire-and-forget broadcast meant any congestion spike could leave funds in limbo for days.

Catastrophic category looks more like address reuse compromising privacy after the fact, or sending to the wrong asset's address (BTC to a BCH address from a fork-aware exchange). The first leaks information you can't unleak, the second is sometimes recoverable through the receiving service but never guaranteed.

Two habits that disproportionately reduce mistake rates:

1. Always send a small test transaction first when interacting with a new address or exchange flow. The fee is small relative to typical transaction sizes and catches the most common configuration errors.
2. Use coin control deliberately for any non-trivial outgoing payment. Default coin selection is fine for spending, but it can erode privacy assumptions and surface unexpected change-output behavior that confuses subsequent reconciliation.

The category that almost never has a clean recovery path is signed-but-not-broadcast transactions stored insecurely — the asymmetry between sign and broadcast is where bearer-instrument risk concentrates.