I am a Linux desktop user myself but:
a) The AMD drivers were unusable crap for a very long time, things have improved only thanks to the open source driver (that ATI/AMD did not write, they only contributed specs). Basically 3D and OpenGL in Linux was for years synonymous with "buy Nvidia, it works".
b) I don't understand this "holier than thou" attitudes when Linux desktop isn't even a blip on the radar and pretty much contributes zero to the bottom line of these companies. However, it tends to have the most vocal, noisy and abusive users ...
Instead of being glad that Nvidia actually supports Linux (and FreeBSD and few other free OSes) for ~20 years now (before ATI even had a Linux driver at all!), we heap abuse on them because their drivers aren't to our taste? Would it be better if they cut their losses and stop providing this support? Especially for stuff that doesn't have any alternatives, such as CUDA? And no, Intel integrated graphics really isn't an option for high performance graphics and ATI's open source drivers are quite a bit slower. Of course, if all you need is requiring accelerated desktop so that you can have nice transparency/compositing and accelerated video playing, then you won't see this.
I don't get where did you get the idea about the "lowest common denominator quality driver" from Nvidia. Sure there are bugs and issues (e.g. with suspend) but in my experience the Nvidia graphic drivers were the least troublesome when it came to application support, OpenGL spec + extension support and various bugs. And I have been using 3D drivers in Linux essentially from the very beginning, when the top end hardware meant a 3DFX card or later a Riva TNT. My diploma thesis ran on a 3DFX back in the day ...
That said, it doesn't mean we shouldn't complain when something doesn't work but let's not forget the size of the market. A dose of reality helps - jumping up and down and yelling really really loud to look important doesn't make one so.
They'd lose more if they did that. Do you think the whole world of HPC/ML/scientific computing will switch to windows to use nvidia cards ? The answer to that is no. They'll just move over to AMD. ROCM is coming along fairly well. Or something else will pop up. Don't get too attached to blobs.
This is a lie.
All of the main contributors for the amdgpu drivers are AMD employees. The files in drivers/gpu/drm/amd/amdgpu all have AMD copyrights in the headers.