NVIDIA created quality (but proprietary) drivers for Linux early on, when supporting Linux at all was not a given. They should get at least a tiny bit of credit for this.
Quality? Calling those "quality" is a bit of a stretch. Installing was and still is a gamble and so is every tiny system update. That hasn't changed a bit. And I'm saying that as someone who was first introduced to Linux on a Matrox GPU.
As long as one didn't have to downgrade X11, they were straightforward to install. You are right that upgrades was a pain, but I believe the drivers themselves were on-par with the Windows drivers.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. They’ve all but abandoned these so called quality drivers since, so no, no credit is deserved.
What OS and whose drivers are running on all these NVIDIA-equipped computers today?