The final episode of The Mandalorian season 2 saw Din Djarin's collected gang of Mandalorians, marshalls and bounty hunters take on Moff Gideon's Rebel remnant and the Dark Troopers, but not without the inconvenience of a jammed blaster. The question - as with a lot of Star Wars technology - is how a piece of such seemingly advanced military tech should let the user down (and it not be an isolated incident). In this case, the gun in question failed Cara Dune, whose role as the crew's heavy artillery came to a shuddering end early in the mission.
Faced with seemingly insurmountable odds - at least when the magnitude of the Dark Troopers' powers came to light in a blistering fistfight between one trooper and Mando - the squad had the advantage of the element of surprise. That was largely thanks to Gideon's destruction of the Razor Crest, which handed his enemies the advantage and all because of the weakness of his emotional ties to Din Djarin. That revenge ultimately cost him a victory, but even with the advantage, Mando's crew were almost undone when Cara Dune's heavy blaster rifle jammed with the stormtroopers bearing down on her.
Intriguingly, Dune's reaction to the jamming suggests that it's far from the first time, and precedent from elsewhere in Star Wars canon confirms it's not a one-off. But with technology advanced to the stage of hyperspace travel, why would a weapon jam in the same way a historically more primitive design might? The answer is that blasters typically still operate with at least one old fashioned mechanic and as long as there are moving parts, there are parts that can fail and become jammed. The specifics of why that could happen are the more challenging part to work out, but Cara Dune offers her own hint when she eventually manages to fix the rifle by slamming it off the floor. It's a simple fact is that technology is fallible and sometimes it takes a humanoid to show it who is boss. Star Wars lore confirms that blasters still depend on gas cartridges, which run out (hence Cloud City mining the gas), and because those gas cartridge can be removed, they can be put back incorrectly, causing the jam.
This isn't the first time in The Mandalorian that a blaster appears to jam: in episode 7 of season 2, Mando's own weapon fails to fire, despite how unlikely it may seem. And elsewhere, in The Clone Wars, Season 4 episode "Deception" Obi-Wan Kenobi excuses his failure to kill an innocent when he's in disguise by claiming his "blaster jammed". Given that his fellows accept the excuse, precedent is set, and of course, Cara Dune's rifle malfunction makes for another, more visible example. And while it's a well-used trope in military-themed movies and shows to ramp up the dramatic stakes, and is used in the Battlefront video games as a means to limit the player over-firing (which is achieved by having blasters overheat), there is a mechanical reason for malfunction too.
The Star Wars Book offers some background into advances in blaster design:
"Thousands of years before the Galactic Civil War, these projectile weapons gave way to energy blasters that are easier to reload and more effective than the ancient weapons. No matter their specialized purpose, the basic function is largely the same. Using an energy source, often a cartridge filled with energized gas, a blaster propels a glowing particle beam at high speed. Depending on the gas and design of the blaster, different color bolts are possible. Red is the most common, but green, blue, and yellow are potential variants."
That confirms that blasters have at least the moveable part of a gas cartridge. Firing requires gas to move from that cartridge to the activation chamber, and that at least offers a mechanical solution for how a jam could be possible. Should the cartridge not be fitted correctly, the gas would fail to move into the activation chamber, stopping a successful shot. The fact that Cara Dune is able to fix her heavy rifle by hitting it and presumably moving the cartridge into place properly would seemingly make this the most likely solution. Fundamentally, Star Wars and The Mandalorian in particular are set within a universe where technological advancement does not guarantee infallibility. This is, after all, a universe in which Ewoks can beat stormtroopers and where the intended "perfect" model of clone troopers failed.
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