I haven't seen tearing in longer than I can remember, and can't remember anyone even mentioning it, so I think you're overplaying this point JUST a tad. I tend to use older laptops with Linux, and older screens (VGA, DVI), so maybe that's the reason.
I hate touchpads.
I don't do PDF editing.
Everything's a tradeoff.
I do indeed have a portrait monitor for throwing terminals on to, and it's the worst place for making tearing visible.
I rarely use my external monitor, and I can't even remember the last time I had used it in portrait mode, so these comments made me realize there could be use cases (and not just hardware or drivers) that trigger tearing that I just hadn't encountered. But I just took a quick shot at it, and I didn't see tearing, at least not on YouTube, nor when moving a window around.
I'm on Wayland with Intel graphics.