I switched from Nvidya to AMD a couple of months ago, not a couple of years ago. So I can say with confidence and very recent experience that what you’re saying is absolute twaddle.
II had nothing but trouble with the 390xx drivers for my old Nvidya card. I had to use the AUR as the source of drivers, because it was a legacy card and one day, they just got dropped from the Arch repos. And the AUR version was always lagging for a couple of days whenever kernel updated. So, unless I was really careful with updates, I would make my computer unbootable and had to chroot to fix it. That was fine until the AUR package got orphaned, because the original maintainer had enough of this nonsense about the driver breaking with every kernel update. I wasn’t even upset at him, I would have orphaned that package if I maintained it, too. Thus, it was pretty much impossible for me to update for at least 2-3 months. Only when @jonathon took over the 390xx drivers was I able to update again.
BTW, this card I had was perfectly fine and working well, there was nothing wrong with it and it was powerful enough for most of my needs. But I had to replace it, because the drivers were making my life miserable.
Nvidya makes fine cards from the hardware perspective, but their Linux drivers and support is absolutely atrocious. They couldn’t care less about Linux. They care about Linux even less than they care about not generating e-waste and Tim Cook’s giraffe.
Hence, Linux users should not care about Nvidya. Unless they open the source code of their drivers and license them under a Free Software licence, so that community can take over the development of drivers once Nvidya decides for me that it is time to send a perfectly usable and valid graphics card to e-waste simply because they want me to spend more money on a new card from them (fat chance, you bastards!), I will never again buy or recommend an Nvidya card to anyone. My experience is simply too bitter, and I wouldn’t want this even for my worst enemy.
And yes, when it comes to graphics cards of similar performance, AMD cards tend to be significantly more affordable than Nvidya. Of course, prices fluctuate, but this is more often than not the case.