When I run Gentoo or Arch, I know. But when I run Ubuntu or Fedora, should I have needed to know?
On plenty of distros "I want to install it and forget about is reasonable" and on both Gentoo and Ubuntu I have rebooted from a working system into a system where the display stopped working, at least on Gentoo I was ready because I broke it somehow.
Absolutely I once had an issue with kernel/user-space driver version mismatch in Ubuntu, trivial to fix and the kernel logs tell you what's wrong. But yeah I get that most users don't read their kernel logs and it shouldn't be an expectation to do so for normal users of linux. The experiences are just very different, it's why the car mechanic analogy fits so well.
I think it also got so much better over time, I've been using Linux since debian woody (22 years ago) the stuff you had to deal with back then heavily skews my perspective on what users today see as unacceptable brokenness in the Nvidia driver.
I've run NixOS for almost a decade now and I honestly would not recommend anything else. I've had many issues with booting on almost every distro. They're about as reliable as Windows in that regard. NixOS has been absolutely rock solid; beyond anything I could possibly have hoped for. In the extremely rare case my system would not boot, I've either found a hardware problem that would affect anyone, or I could just revert to a previous system revision and boot up. Never had any problem. No longer use anything else because it's just too risky
On plenty of distros "I want to install it and forget about is reasonable" and on both Gentoo and Ubuntu I have rebooted from a working system into a system where the display stopped working, at least on Gentoo I was ready because I broke it somehow.