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.