They also had hundreds of years of military dominance of Europe, up until the Napoleonic Wars. Generally not so hot since then. I definitely don't think it's a completely deserved rep, but it undeniably exists.
Mesa has been the defacto standard for AMD for years. It's always performed better than the official driver. AMD just made it their official recommendation recently.
I think Intel also uses Mesa, with Nvidia being the odd one out
My example applied to all distros, the difference would be the time it takes that code change (which resolved a critical to me bug) takes to actually be available to use.
There's also very little that's specific to me about that, it's a real use case that comes up repeatedly for new releases that tend to push things graphically. I'm only going to recommend distros that minimize the time to get those fixes because it's a better user experience for the target demographic with little downside.
Considering games are the most intensive things most people will use their computer for, I think it's fine to optimize for that use case and assume everything else will be "fine"
I've literally had to wait for fixes to hit new mesa versions to play newly released games. Having those packages be up to date is just going to be a better experience for people that care about that kind of stuff
Works fine in Firefox on Android