I see people having trouble with nVidia all the time as well. I’ve had numerous models from them in almost 30 years of desktop linux with very few issues. All in all they just plainly worked as advertised. You sometimes had to fiddle a bit to get the closed source drivers, depending on the distribution, but that was pretty much it.

I never knew where their reputation came from.

Note that I don’t especially endorse them, they’re definitely crooks. But then Ati/Amd only recently got something decent to the market.