I've had 1 faulty driver since 2011, so I just downgraded in 10 seconds and waited for the next patch

Damn that's very lucky. Every device with Nvidia hardware that I installed Linux on has at some point during updates or whatever gone to shit. However I must say that it has become way better in recent years. My Thinkpad was the worst because it was my first Linux device and it had an integrated Intel gpu and a dedicated Nvidia GPU and getting it to work was horror. In the end a friend of mine who was better at Linux just forced it to always use the Nvidia card because then at least stuff worked reliably (tm).

But even then it pretty much always died during Ubuntu release updates. I've nuked my whole system once because the screen went black (due to GPU drivers presumably) during one and after an hour or so I forcefully turned off the laptop because I couldn't do anything anymore. After restarting into a tty my laptop was in some sort of limbo between 2 Ubuntu versions and I basically just had to reinstall.

Ever since I made Linux (Arch btw) my main OS for gaming at the start of this year it has been quite stable though. I did switch to LTS kernels and after that everything has been pretty chill.

Yeah I got amd graphics 3 years ago and the same day, all those weird issues with graphics artifacts or suspend bugs just went away.

If you didnt have any of those, you are Indeed lucky. I had many of them through the years.