The thing is, Nvidia also has issues, but their PR game is historically better. Many graphics developers have had experiences with Nvidia support where they run into a strange bug and are instructed to set a magic value to enable a driver hack. AMD drivers have had good and bad periods and hacks of their own, but are usually better behaved in this respect. But it's actually Intel that gets the most praise for adhering to spec, and therefore being a useful baseline. So user perceptions and dev perceptions diverge on what makes the drivers good, actually, and this has shifted with the different generations of APIs too; as we've gone towards a lower level access model, the basic driver functionality has become less focused on performance hacks, but there is a lot of legacy support there to support old games.

We're long past the worst period for Radeon on Linux which was back in the 2000's with "fglrx" - a driver that I never managed to get working. The new stuff will run with some competence.