It's ridiculous to say that AMD (previously ATI) has always been the better choice, and I don't think anybody who used the ATI drivers would agree with you. For years the only reliable way to get GPU acceleration on Linux was basically NVidia.

When AMD bought ATI they started work on the open source drivers and improved the situation, but they had already lost me as a GPU customer by that point.

Maybe now in the 2020s AMD has caught up, and I'll keep them in mind next time I buy a GPU, but I've been happy with NVidia for a long time.

It would be nice if the NVidia driver were in the kernel and open source, but the Debian package has just worked for a very long time now.