It’s more of “NVIDIA bad” than “AMD good”. AMD does what is expected in the Linux world, to make open source drivers that are part of the Mesa project. That shouldn’t be an amazing feat of awesomeness, that should just be standard procedure. However, when the competition is so horrifically bad at drivers on Linux, following the standard makes AMD look amazing. For what it’s worth, I have an Intel Arc A770 on my Linux setup and it works great. Intel also follows the standard procedure of making their drivers open and part of the Mesa project. However, AMD has been in the graphics card (and driver) game for much longer and their drivers have a lot more optimization, plus Valve has put work into making AMD’s drivers better for gaming workloads over the past several years (especially given the Steam Deck runs an AMD GPU). Hopefully Intel gets more performance parity with AMD in the Linux driver world as time goes on. It’s definitely gotten much better since launch already.
As for NVIDIA, maybe NVK can make them even sort of useful without the nasty proprietary drivers but reverse engineered drivers are always going to take longer to get anywhere near the same performance of ones written based on actual official documentation.