I disagree with that. The main problem is that Nouveau was stagnant for years because it just wasn’t feasible to use since NVIDIA blocked reclocking support, so it would only ever run at its base clock, resulting in terrible performance. So nobody wanted to use the drivers, all that mattered is that they worked well enough to let users install the proprietary drivers.

But now that NVIDIA allows reclocking again, there’s actual reason to improve the performance and fix bugs in it.